Abstract

This paper reports the study of an Optical Fourier Domain Imaging (OFDI) setup for optical coherence tomography. One of the main drawbacks of OFDI is its inability to differentiate positive and negative depths. Some setups have already been proposed to remove this depth ambiguity by introducing a modulation by means of electro-optic or acousto-optic modulators. In our setup, we implement a piezoelectric fiber stretcher to generate a periodic phase shift between successive A-scans, thus introducing a transverse modulation. The depth ambiguity is then resolved by performing a Fourier treatment in the transverse direction before processing the data in the axial direction. It is similar to the B-M mode scanning already proposed for Spectral-Domain OCT¹ but with a more efficient experimental setup. We discuss the advantages and the drawbacks of our technique compared to the technique based on acousto-optics modulators by comparing images of an onion obtained with both techniques.

© 2007 SPIE