Spectral delay line for display control in swept source OCT

Abstract

A modality of controlling the unbalanced dispersion in an optical coherence tomography (OCT) set-up is presented, together with image processing techniques that improve the quality of the interferogram image by reducing its noise and dispersion. The ultimate goal of the study is to obtain dispersion free and enhanced signal to noise ratio OCT images of the human retina. The OCT set-up incorporates a spectral delay line, which is used to compensate for the dispersion in the system. The configuration is driven by a swept optical source. The interferometric signal is digitized by a fast acquisition board, then processed and rendered as images on a computer display. Preliminary results are presented showing images of a multilayer structure obtained using different filtering techniques that were tested for their effects on the noise reduction and image sharpness.