Optical coherence tomography (OCT)

Dual Spot Swept Source Optical Coherence Tomography using Coherence Revival

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is widely used in ophthalmology today. Despite this, patient motion is often much faster than current commercial OCT systems. When this occurs, the patient motion corrupts and distorts the image. This has driven the research community to develop methods to increase the acquisition speed of OCT. One method to increase the speed is to scan multiple beams simultaneously. In fact, as early as 2009, researchers began to use multiple beams to reduce acquisition time, but they essentially added another system for every additional beam. Although this approach satisfied the objective of increasing the imaging speed, it required an instrument that is more complex, expensive, and difficult to maintain. To overcome this limitation, we have developed a new, and very efficient, method to double the imaging speed of a swept source OCT system by using two beams and the optical phenomenon known as coherence revival. The image above was acquired in half the normal acquisition time at a rate of 80 million volumetric pixels (voxels) per second.