Multifiber angular compounding optical coherence tomography for speckle reduction

Abstract

We report on an integrated fiber optic design to implement multifiber angular compounding optical coherence tomography, which enables angular compounding for speckle reduction. A multi-facet fiber array delivers three light beams to the sample with different incident angles. Back-reflective/back-scattered signals from these channels were simultaneously detected by a three-channel spectrometer. The axial and lateral resolution was measured to be ∼3 and ∼3.5 μm, respectively, in air with ∼100 dB sensitivity. We conducted ex vivo experiments on a rat esophagus to demonstrate a contrast to noise improvement of 1.58.