Abstract
We present a new ultra high resolution spectral domain polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) system based on polarization maintaining (PM) fibers. The method transfers the principles of our previous bulk optic PS-OCT systems to a fiberized setup. The phase shift between the orthogonal polarization states travelling in the two orthogonal modes of the PM fiber is compensated by software in post processing. Thereby, the main advantage of our bulk optics setups, i.e. the use of only a single input polarization state to simultaneously acquire reflectivity, retardation, optic axis orientation, and Stokes vector, is maintained. The use of a broadband light source of 110 nm bandwidth provides improved depth resolution and smaller speckle size. The latter is important for improved resolution of depolarization imaging. We demonstrate our instrument for high-resolution PS-OCT imaging of the healthy human retina.
Highlights
During the last 20 years optical coherence tomography (OCT) has developed into a powerful technique for imaging of transparent and translucent structures [1,2]
In this paper we present, as we believe for the first time, an ultra high resolution spectral domain (SD)-polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) system based on polarization maintaining (PM) fibers
As described in detail in [21], an SD-Polarization sensitive (PS)-OCT system based on two separate spectrometers requires two identical spectrometers to record the horizontally and vertically polarized spectral interferograms
Summary
During the last 20 years optical coherence tomography (OCT) has developed into a powerful technique for imaging of transparent and translucent structures [1,2]. In 2003 it has been shown that spectral domain (SD) OCT has huge advantages in terms of sensitivity and imaging speed [6,7,8], enabling high speed imaging in 2 and 3 dimensions [9,10]. Polarization sensitive (PS) OCT is a functional extension of OCT [12,13,14]. PS-OCT takes advantage of the additional polarization information carried by the reflected light, and can add new image contrast compared to intensity based OCT. PS-OCT can reveal important information about biological tissue, such as quantitative distribution of birefringence, which is unavailable in conventional OCT
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