Effects of fiber bundle on the performance of full-field swept source OCT

This paper investigates the effects of fiber bundle on the performance of Full-field swept source OCT (FFSS-OCT) in terms of depth range, depth resolution and transversal resolution. A superfast CMOS camera with full sensor resolution 1024 x 1024 pixels and 60 kHz in maximum frame rate is employed in the testing system. A fiber bundle which contains 18000 single fibers is used to transmit images from interference beam to the camera. Depth range and resolution are assessed by varying optical path difference (OPD) between object arm and reference arm. The operation is repeated under a set of frame rates from 1 kHz to 3 kHz. In addition, an USAF plate is used as a planar object to test transversal resolution. For comparison, above parameters are tested as well with a bulk-optic setup which is built under the same system configuration but without bundle. The results show that the difference between performances of bundle and Bulkoptic setups is not remarkable. As a practical example, 3D profile of a coin is measured using two setups. In sum, this investigation shows that the performance of bundle setup can compete with that of bulk-optic setup in implementing FFSS-OCT. The quantitative results are helpful for researchers to incorporate bundles to FFSS-OCT systems in future. © 2013 SPIE.