Master/slave based optical coherence tomography for in-vivo, real-time, long axial imaging range of the anterior segment

In this report, we demonstrate that in a coherence revival (CR) based swept source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) set-up, real-time cross-sectional long-range images can be produced via the Master Slave (MS) method. The total tolerance of the MS method to nonlinear tuning, to dispersion in the interferometer and to dispersion due to the laser cavity, makes the MS ideally suited to the practice of coherence revival. In addition, enhanced versatility is allowed by the MS method in displaying shorter axial range images than that determined by the digital sampling of the data. This brings an immediate improvement in the speed of displaying cross-sectional images at high rates without the need of extra hardware such as graphics processing units or field programmable gate arrays. The long axial range of the coherence revival regime is proven with images of the anterior segment of healthy human eye.