Noise statistics of phase-resolved optical coherence tomography imaging: single-and dual-beam-scan Doppler optical coherence tomography

Abstract

Noise statistics of phase-resolved optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging are complicated and involve noises of OCT, correlation of signals, and speckles. In this paper, the statistical properties of phase shift between two OCT signals that contain additive random noises and speckle noises are presented. Experimental results obtained with a scattering tissue phantom are in good agreement with theoretical predictions. The performances of the dual-beam method and conventional single-beam method are compared. As expected, phase shift noise in the case of the dual-beam-scan method is less than that for the single-beam method when the transversal sampling step is large.