Artifact removal in Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography with a piezoelectric fiber stretcher

We describe an artifact removal setup swept-source optical coherence tomography (OCT) system that enables high-speed full-range imaging. 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 filtering in the transverse direction before processing the data in the axial direction. The do artifact is also removed. The key factor is that the piezoelectric fiber stretcher can be used to generate discrete phase shifts with a high repetition rate. The proposed experimental setup is a much improved version of the previously reported B-M mode scanning for spectral-domain OCT in that it does not generate additional artifacts. It is a simple and low-cost solution for artifact removal that can easily be applied. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America.