Study of dispersion extraction for optical coherence tomography imaging

Dispersion mismatch of optical coherence tomography (OCT), caused by inherent dispersion of biological sample, leads to axial resolution degradation and image blurring. However, the dispersion of biological samples may carry characteristic information of itself. Therefore, it is useful and important to extract dispersion as an additional parameter of biological samples. Here, we study and compare five categories of conventional OCT dispersion extraction methods first. The results show that the iterative method has the best accuracy and stability. Furthermore, we propose an improved iterative method, which achieves higher accuracy and stability in simulation compared with conventional methods. Then, the dispersion values of optical glasses are extracted experimentally utilizing the proposed method. The extracted values are consistent well with reference values. Furthermore, we apply the proposed method for extracting the dispersion characteristics of zebrafish eye. With the proposed method, OCT-based analysis of dispersion characteristics could be a powerful tool in clinical practice.