Tuning a fast linear camera used within a talbot bands spectrometer-based optical coherence tomography set-up

Spectrometer-based Optical Coherence Tomography (Sp-OCT) introduced a number of improvements in terms of imaging speed and overall sensitivity over the existing OCT methods. This variant uses a spectrometer to acquire channelled spectra resulting from white light interferometry, which are then processed to yield the depth profiles for each transverse position. A spectrometer can be constructed using a dispersive medium such as a diffraction grating, focusing optics and a linear camera, which allows for a certain degree of control over the spectrometer parameters (exposure time, wavelength range and resolution). The recent advances in line camera technology also allow for fast camera readings, effectively increasing the frame rate of OCT B-scan images acquired and minimizing motion artifacts, which is especially important when imaging moving samples. In the presented work the usage of a commercial line camera (Basler Sprint spl-140km) employed in a Talbot bands based OCT system is reported. An analysis of how the configured parameters (exposure time, pixel binning, number of pixels read) affect the spectrometer's resolution and the OCT sensitivity profile is also described. © 2013 SPIE.