Experimental validation of an optimized signal processing method to handle non-linearity in swept-source optical coherence tomography

We evaluate various signal processing methods to handle the non-linearity in wavenumber space exhibited by most laser sources for swept-source optical coherence tomography. The following methods are compared for the same set of experimental data: non-uniform discrete Fourier transforms with Vandermonde matrix or with Lomb periodogram, resampling with linear interpolation or spline interpolation prior to fast-Fourier transform (FFT), and resampling with convolution prior to FFT. By selecting an optimized Kaiser-Bessel window to perform the convolution, we show that convolution followed by FFT is the most efficient method. It allows small fractional oversampling factor between 1 and 2, thus a minimal computational time, while retaining an excellent image quality.