Abstract

Recently, first spectral domain (SD) polarization sensitive (PS) optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems have been presented, thus combining the ability to gather birefringence information and the advantages of SD-OCT which allows for high acquisition speed and increased sensitivity compared to conventional time domain (TD) OCT. These instruments employed different detection units to record the spectral information of the polarized interferometric signal.

We present two approaches to SD PS-OCT systems with different detection units to record the spectral interferograms from the two orthogonal polarization channels of the PS interferometer. Whereas one employs two complete spectrometers, i.e. one for each polarization channel, only a single spectrometer is used for the other one. In the latter case the two polarization channels’ beams share the same diffraction grating, imaging lens and line scan camera. We point out the constructional differences of these two setups, discuss advantages and limitations of the different methods and show results of calibration and performance measurements for both setups. Furthermore, PS-OCT images of human tissue are presented to demonstrate the performance of both system designs.

© 2007 SPIE