Journal
BIOMEDICAL OPTICS EXPRESS
Volume 6, Issue 4, Pages 1340-1350Publisher
Optica Publishing Group
DOI: 10.1364/BOE.6.001340
Keywords
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Funding
- Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR, China [HKU 7172/12E, 717911E, 720112E, 17207714, 17208414]
- Innovation and Technology Support Programme [ITS/090/14, ITS/189/13]
- HKU
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As the key prerequisite of high-speed volumetric structural and functional tissue imaging in real-time, scaling the A-scan rate beyond MHz has been one of the major pursuits in the development of optical coherence tomography (OCT). Along with a handful of techniques enabling multi-MHz, amplified optical time-stretch OCT (AOT-OCT) has recently been demonstrated as a viable alternative for ultrafast swept-source OCT well above MHz without the need for the mechanical wavelength-tuning mechanism. In this paper, we report a new generation of AOT-OCT demonstrating superior performance to its older generation and all other time-stretch-based OCT modalities in terms of shot-to-shot stability, sensitivity (similar to 90dB), roll-off performance (>4 mm/dB) and A-scan rate (11.5 MHz). Such performance is mainly attributed to the combined contribution from the stable operation of the broadband and compact mode-locked fiber laser as well as the optical amplification in-line with the time-stretch process. The system allows us, for the first time, to deliver volumetric time-stretch-based OCT of biological tissues with the single-shot A-scan rate beyond 10 MHz. Comparing with the existing high-speed OCT systems, the inertia-free AOT-OCT shows promises to realize high-performance 3D OCT imaging at video rate. (C)2015 Optical Society of America
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