Abstract
In optical coherence microscopy (OCM) with a given numerical aperture (NA) of the objectives the transverse resolution can be increased by increasing the numerical aperture of illumination (NAi). However, this may also lead to attenuation of the signal with defocus preventing the effective numerically focused 3D imaging of the required sample volume. This paper presents an approach to structuring the illumination aperture, which allows combining the advantages of increased transverse resolution (peculiar to high NAi) with small attenuation of the signal with defocus (peculiar to low NAi) for high-resolution numerically focused 3D imaging in OCM.
Highlights
One of the major problems in Fourier domain (FD) optical coherence tomography/microscopy (OCT/optical coherence microscopy (OCM)) is the trade-off between either high transverse resolution or large depth of field
The probably most effective solution of this problem consists in numerical focusing of the recorded OCM signal, which allows extending the region of high transverse resolution in the acquired 3D image beyond the optical focus depth just by numerical processing, e.g. [1 – 4]
In conclusion, we proposed an approach to FD OCM imaging, combining a Linnik-type OCM with structured illumination aperture with special numerical processing proposed in [4, 7]
Summary
One of the major problems in Fourier domain (FD) optical coherence tomography/microscopy (OCT/OCM) is the trade-off between either high transverse resolution (achieved using objectives with high numerical apertures NA) or large depth of field (achieved using objectives with low NA). To provide better coverage of a sample’s transverse spatial spectrum and reduce overlapping of transverse spatial spectra of the individual signals, corresponding to different illumination directions, these illumination spots should be maximally remote from each other and close to the physical aperture borders This approach is suited to FF OCM, which is very promising for numerically focused 3D OCM imaging due to the possibility of parallel data acquisition in the transverse direction, but can be applied in the case of scanning confocal OCM, as will be discussed below. The realization of this principle that we propose is suitable for numerically focused FF FD OCM imaging and allows for parallelization to certain extent of the detection of parts of the OCM signal corresponding to different illumination directions
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