Performance comparison of spectrometer based and swept source based phase sensitive optical coherence tomography

Spectrometer based and swept source based phase sensitive Fourier Domain OCT systems are compared in terms of the stability of the retrieved signal phase. The spectrometer based system performs with a significantly better phase stability with less uncertainty in the output, whereas the output of the swept source based system is influenced by the jitter noise that creates jumps to the retrieved phase. The experimentally obtained phase traces from the spectrometer based system match well to relevant mathematics.