Point-spread function manipulation of the swept-source optical coherence tomography through temporal phase modulation.

Abstract

Recent breakthroughs in microscopy have surpassed Abbe's spatial diffraction limit, especially in the regime of fluorescence imaging. Microcopy's depth-imaging relative tomography is, however, still confined to basic imaging quality, which is limited by the Fourier bandwidth. In this paper, we explore the analogy between spatial microscopy and temporal tomography based on the space-time duality, and hence enlighten the advancement of tomography. As a proof-of-principle demonstration, an all-optical manipulation of the point-spread function (PSF) of a swept-source optical coherence tomography (OCT) is performed based on temporal phase modulation. Although the axial resolving power remains the same, much sharper sketch lines can be obtained from the specimen. In addition, the imaging quality is also improved with suppressed ghost fringes and better sensitivity.