Sub-4-micron full-field optical coherence tomography on a budget

Abstract

We evaluate the construction and performance of an ultra-low-cost full-field optical coherence tomography (FF-OCT) instrument, also known as an optical coherence microscope. Although the cost of construction of the instrument from off-the-shelf parts is at least ten times lower than those of commercial products, sub-4-micron axial and lateral resolutions are obtained, albeit at the cost of higher acquisition times. Standard test samples are imaged and the performance of the instrument is evaluated. The device is found to be useful in measuring length, dispersion and group refractive index as well. Suggestions for bettering performance are discussed.

Low Cost Open-Source OCT Using Undergraduate Lab Components

“…High-speed cameras also allow FF-OCT to be employed with swept-sources. But FF-OCT can also be implemented [5] using existing lab components with a minimum of parts being purchased. This approach assumes static samples, since the acquisition time for an OCT volume can take a few minutes.…”

ABC-OCT - A Cross-Platform Implementation of Real-Time Fourier-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

“…Some groups have also open-sourced GPU-based [5] OCT pipelines. Our research effort is to produce low-cost OCT [6] implementations, along with the software required for data acquisition and processing.…”

“…Our focus on lowering cost precludes SS-OCT due to relatively high costs of sweptsources. From our initial [6] TD-OCT implementation, we moved on to FD-OCT to shorten acquisition times as is needed for in-vivo biological samples. We found parallel SD-OCT [7] to be an architecture which could support a low-cost implementation.…”

ABC-OCT – A Cross-Platform Implementation of Real-Time Fourier-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

“…Some groups have also open-sourced GPU-based [5] OCT pipelines. Our research effort is to produce lowcost OCT [6] implementations, along with the software required for data acquisition and processing.…”

“…Our focus on lowering cost precludes SS-OCT due to relatively high costs of swept-sources. From our initial [6] TD-OCT implementation, we moved on to FD-OCT to shorten acquisition times as is needed for in-vivo biological samples. We found parallel SD-OCT [7] to be an architecture which could support a lowcost implementation.…”