Open AccessNoise reduction in supercontinuum sources for OCT by single-pulse spectral normalization
Author(s) -
Ryan C. Niemeier,
Z. J. Simmons,
Jeremy D. Rogers
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
applied optics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.668
H-Index - 197
eISSN - 2155-3165
pISSN - 1559-128X
DOI - 10.1364/ao.393141
Subject(s) - supercontinuum , optics , optical coherence tomography , normalization (sociology) , physics , materials science , optical fiber , photonic crystal fiber , sociology , anthropology
Supercontinuum (SC) sources offer high illumination power from a single mode fiber with large spectral bandwidth including the visible spectrum, a growing application area for Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). However, SC spectra suffer from pulse-to-pulse variations, increasing noise in the resulting images. By simultaneously collecting a normalization spectrum, OCT image noise can be reduced by more than half (7 dB) for single pulses without any pulse averaging using only simple optical components.