Dispersion compensation for optical coherence tomography

Abstract

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an imaging technique widely used in various applications especially in biomedical field. It constructs a high resolution 3-D image using multiple cross-sectional views. The axial resolution can be degraded if the sample is dispersive, which is usually true as most of the samples are living tissues. For time-domain OCT, this dispersion is minimized numerically by introducing a compensation filter, which is applied to the obtained signal in Wigner domain, a time-frequency domain. The filter is designed using simulated annealing optimization technique. This paper shows the design of the filter and the results of dispersion compensation.