Crosstalk rejection in parallel optical coherence tomography using spatially incoherent illumination with partially coherent sources

摘要

The continuing improvement of high-speed area-scan cameras has made possible the construction of parallel opticalncoherence tomography (OCT) systems that are competitive with the fastest demonstrated swept-source OCT systems.nUnfortunately, when imaging through turbid media using a partially coherent source, parallel OCT suffers resolutionnloss from coherent multiple scattering, a phenomenon known as crosstalk.Wedemonstrate the use of a full-field OCTnsystem employing multimode fiber in the illumination arm to reduce the spatial coherence of a partially coherentnsource. Byreducing the spatial coherence area below the system’s lateral resolution,wecreate a spatial coherence gatenthat rejects these multiply scattered photons.Wequantify the image quality and resolution improvement of this methodnby comparing images of a USAF test chart acquired beneath turbid phantoms using both coherent and incoherentnillumination and computing the resulting modulation transfer functions. We demonstrate the feasibility of thisnmethod for imaging biological specimens by imaging a Drosophila melanogaster sample.