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Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a widely used imaging technique in the micrometer regime, which gained accelerating interest in medical imaging in the last twenty years. In up-to-date OCT literature, certain simplifying assumptions are made for the reconstructions, but for many applications, a more realistic description of the OCT imaging process is of interest. In mathematical models, for example, the incident angle of light onto the sample is usually neglected or a plane wave description for the light–sample interaction in OCT is used, which ignores almost completely the occurring effects within an OCT measurement process. In this article, we make a first step to a quantitative model by considering the measured intensity as a combination of back-scattered Gaussian beams affected by the system. In contrast to the standard plane wave simplification, the presented model includes system relevant parameters, such as the position of the focus and the spot size of the incident laser beam, which allow a precise prediction of the OCT data. The accuracy of the proposed model—after calibration of all necessary system parameters—is illustrated by simulations and validated by a comparison with experimental data obtained from a 1300 nm nswept-source OCT system.

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<abstract><p>We review mathematical models describing how Optical Coherence Tomography works. Hereby, we focus on models based on Maxwell's equations and their simplifications. We highlight especially the effects of different modeling assumptions for the incident illumination, the medium, the light propagation, and the measurement setup and illustrate the qualitatively differing behavior in numerical simulations of the OCT data and compare them with real data from OCT measurements.</p></abstract>