Multi-wavelength source for the lower exposure intensity of spectral OCT

Abstract

There have been several technologies to enable high resolution cross-sectional images of biological tissues in optical coherence tomography (OCT) method. Optical frequency comb (OFC) source has been proposed to overcome the crosstalk problem among the CCD detector pixels of the continuous spectrum of light source. Recently, a passive-type OFC is demonstrated simply placing a Fabry-Perot interferometer filter right after the broadband light source, but it shows a high loss of output light power and limited tenability of channel spacing of multi-wavelength. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a spectral comparison of a novel multi-wavelength source based on a fiber Sagnac interferometer. The channel spacing is flexibly tuned by the effective length control of polarization-maintaining fiber (PMF). The uniform and stable multi-wavelength spectral distribution is also helpful to obtain the higher sensitivity from the lower exposure intensity source to get a better quality spectral OCT image.