Spectral-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography and Applications for Biological Imaging

Spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) technique has recently attracted significant interest because of its better detection sensitivity and faster image acquisition rates compared with the traditional time-domain optical coherence tomography (TD-OCT) technique. In this paper we introduce the basic principle, experimental setup and the post processing program of a SD-OCT system constructed at our laboratory. The SD-OCT system has an axial resolution of 10 mum in air and 1000 axial scans per second at 3648 pixels per axial scan. It is then demonstrated that the SD-OCT image of onion skin and rat eye, verifying the capability for biological imaging of our system.