The effects of reduced bit depth on optical coherence tomography phase data

Past studies of the effects of bit depth on OCT magnitude data concluded that 8 bits of digitizer resolution provided nearly the same image quality as a 14-bit digitizer. However, such studies did not assess the effects of bit depth on the accuracy of phase data. In this work, we show that the effects of bit depth on phase data and magnitude data can differ significantly. This finding has an important impact on the design of phase-resolved OCT systems, such as those measuring motion and the birefringence of samples, particularly as one begins to consider the tradeoff between bit depth and digitizer speed.