Spectral binning for mitigation of polarization mode dispersion artifacts in catheter-based optical frequency domain imaging

Abstract

Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) has been recognized as a significant barrier to sensitive and reproducible birefringence measurements with fiber-based, polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography systems. Here, we present a signal processing strategy that reconstructs the local retardation robustly in the presence of system PMD. The algorithm uses a spectral binning approach to limit the detrimental impact of system PMD and benefits from the final averaging of the PMD-corrected retardation vectors of the spectral bins. The algorithm was validated with numerical simulations and experimental measurements of a rubber phantom. When applied to the imaging of human cadaveric coronary arteries, the algorithm was found to yield a substantial improvement in the reconstructed birefringence maps.

Estimation of Jones matrix, birefringence and entropy using Cloude-Pottier decomposition in polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

“…(1), we use Eq. (19) in [40] as the local Jones matrix, where we also processed the data by k-dependence correction. Since a product of two multivariate Gaussian distributions is also a multivariate Gaussian distribution [41], the statistical description in the above also holds for the local Jones matrix.…”

“…The additivity of the entropy shown in Eqs. (19) and (21) ensures our approach to separate the individual contributions.…”

“…Among them, Makita et al raised one of the fundamental issues in PS-OCT that the mean of the phase retardation is significantly biased from the true value because of asymmetric distribution [10]. Various methods have been developed to apply averaging to such polarimetric parameters [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. In another approach, an estimator of the phase retardation based on the likelihood of the distribution was also developed [20].…”

All-fiber wavelength swept ring laser based on Fabry-Perot filter for optical frequency domain imaging

“…This complex valued fringe signal is then linearly interpolated with our calibrated mapping to obtain 648 sample points corresponding to this one mirror term, which are then zero-padded to a length of 1024. Additionally, we compensated for remaining dispersion imbalance [5,27,28]. Representative point-spread functions at various delays are shown as red traces in Fig.…”

Intravascular optical coherence tomography [Invited]

“…Following the finding that polarization mode dispersion in the OCT interferometer and catheters inhibits accurate and reproducible polarimetry [107], methods were identified to mitigate this effect and enable intravascular birefringence [108,109] and depolarization [110] measurements. This work has recently been translated into clinical studies with intriguing results demonstrating the very promising utility of polarimetry for vascular and plaque characterization [37,38].…”