Calibration and characterization protocol for spectral-domain optical coherence tomography using fiber Bragg gratings

We present a calibration protocol to obtain the alignment factors of a custom-made spectrometer and the nonlinear fitting function between the measured CCD pixel domain and the wavelength domain to apply to the spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) using fiber Bragg gratings. We have used five gratings with different center wavelengths covering the broadband source spectral range. All have a narrow spectral bandwidth (0.05 nm) and the same reflectivity (92%) to calibrate and align the custom-made spectrometer. The implemented SD-OCT system following the proposed protocol showed the alignment factors as 44.37 deg incident angle, 53.11 deg diffraction angle, and 70.0-mm focal length. The spectral resolution of 0.187 nm was recalculated from the alignment factors.