Versatile Full-Field Optical Coherence Tomography with Adjustable Transmission-to-Reflection Ratio and Enhanced Signal-to-Noise Ratio

TL;DR

This paper introduces a versatile full-field optical coherence tomography system with adjustable transmission-to-reflection ratio, enhancing measurement accuracy, signal-to-noise ratio, and imaging depth across diverse samples.

Contribution

It presents a novel FF-OCT system with tunable beam-splitting ratio, overcoming fixed-ratio limitations and improving imaging performance for various sample types.

Findings

Adjustable ratio improves measurement accuracy for different samples.

Optimizing the beam-splitting ratio enhances SNR and imaging depth.

The system achieves broader applicability compared to fixed-ratio FF-OCT.

Abstract

Traditional full-field optical coherence tomography (FF-OCT) is effective for rapid cross-sectional imaging but often suffers from incoherent signals due to imbalanced light intensities between the sample and reference arms. While the high-throughput dark-field (HTDF) FF-OCT technique employs an asymmetric beamsplitter (BS) to achieve an asymmetric beam-splitting ratio and optimize the utilization of available light, the fixed beam-splitting ratio in the optical system limits HTDF FF-OCT to effectively measuring only specific types of samples with certain scattering intensities. To address this limitation, we propose a more versatile FF-OCT system with an adjustable transmission-to-reflection ratio. This system enables accurate measurement across a broader range of samples by optimizing the light source and finely tuning the polarization to achieve the ideal ratio for different materials. We also observed that both signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and imaging depth are influenced by the beam-splitting ratio. By precisely adjusting the beam-splitting ratio, both SNR and imaging depth can be optimized to achieve their optimal values.