Methods to assess sensitivity of optical coherence tomography systems

Measuring the sensitivity of an optical coherence tomography (OCT) system determines the minimum sample reflectivity it can detect and provides a figure of merit for system optimization and comparison. The published literature lacks a detailed description of OCT sensitivity measurement procedures. Here we describe a commonly-used measurement method and introduce two new phantom-based methods, which also offer a means to directly visualize low reflectivity conditions relevant to biological tissue. We provide quantitative results for the three methods from different OCT system configurations and discuss the methods' advantages and disadvantages.