Differential phase contrast OCT in transparent and scattering media

摘要

Many biological objects have a poor contrast in microscopy when they are imaged on the basis of the intensity of transmitted and reflected light. For pure phase objects the differential phase contrast technique increases the contrast of the images. We combined the differential phase contrast technique with optical coherence tomography. Our setup is based on a Michelson interferometer with a polarization sensitive detection unit. We scan the sample with two orthogonally polarized beams, which are separated by a distance of 17.5 mu m. The full interferometric signal of each object beam is recorded by a separate detector. We calculate the phase functions of the interferometric signal through analytic continuation by use of the Hilbert transformation. Subtracting the two phase functions we get the phase difference between the object beams. Now we can derive the path length difference of the object beams at a certain depth in the object where the light was backscattered. The method is independent of variations in the backscattering coefficient, which was a problem in an earlier version of our setup. To investigate the performance of the technique we measured pure phase objects in the nm range. Differential phase measurements through scattering test samples quantified the influence of scattering on the phase measurement. First images of cell structures are presented.