Real-time phase-resolved optical coherence tomography and optical Doppler tomography

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Abstract
We have developed a novel real-time phase-resolved optical coherence tomography (OCT) and optical Doppler tomography (ODT) system using optical Hilbert transformation. By combining circularly polarized reference and linearly polarized sample signals, in-phase and quadrature interference components are produced in separate channels and treated as the real and imaginary parts of a complex signal to obtain the phase information directly. Using a resonant scanner at an axial scanning speed of 4 kHz in the reference arm of the interferometer, both structure and blood flow velocity images with 200 axial scans can be acquired at 20 frames per second with high sensitivity and large dynamic range. Real-time videos of in vivo blood flow in the chick chorioallantoic membrane using this interferometer are presented.