Supercontinuum in the practice of Optical Coherence Tomography with emphasis on noise effects

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is an imaging modality which has proven, since the early 1990s, its incredible potential. Nowadays, numerous fields of medical investigation, such as Ophthalmology, Dermatology or Cardiovascular imaging, would not be the same without the diagnostic tools bring by OCT. This tremendous development has been supported by industry support through improvement of dedicated components such as lasers, cameras and optics.

A great example of this development is the evolution of Supercontinuum (SC) sources. Due to the extremely broad spectrum cover by SC sources, their high power density and high spatial coherence, it seems obvious to use them for driving OCT systems. However, an intensity noise issue arising from the SC sources has been reported as a limitation for OCT and needs to be addressed.

The aim of the work presented in this thesis is to create a link between the world of Optical Coherence Tomography and Supercontinuum physics in order to understand the origins and the impact of SC source intensity noise into the OCT systems. This work is of importance as it helps to optimize the usefulness of the current generation of SC sources. Also, this work is a part of the work necessary for developing a new generation of SC sources which completely addresses the intensity noise limitations. More precisely, a part of the work presented deals with an optimization of the association SC source and OCT. The second part of the results is an attempt for improving this association by using a new SC source design.