Instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio of time-domain optical coherence tomography

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2005

Authors

Sherif, SS (Author) Other; Rosa, CC (Author) FCUP; Podoleanu, AG (Author) Other

Conference proceedings International

Title: Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE

Pages: 1-5

Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Techniques II

Munich, 12 June 2005 through 16 June 2005

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge

Scopus - 0 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-007-EG6

Abstract (EN): We model the photocurrent of a depth-scan (A-scan) from an optical coherence tomography (OCT) system, using a linearly polarized thermal source, as an electronically filtered doubly-stochastic Poisson process, and we obtain its time-varying second-order statistics. We derive an expression for the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of time-domain OCT which is more general than the previously reported time-averaged expressions. Unlike previous work, our analysis combines shot noise, due to detection of coherent light, and photon excess noise, due to fluctuations in the optical field, into a single noise source that we refer to as the photoelectron noise. Similar to previous results, our SNR is dominated by a term similar to shot-noise when the reference optical power is low and by a term similar to photon excess noise when the reference power is high. © 2005 SPIE and OSA.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 5