Complete Removal of Arbitrarily Strong and Arbitrarily Located Auto Correlation Artifacts in Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography: Demonstration of an Efficient and Cost Effective Technique

The proof-of-principle demonstration of a simple, yet effective method of autocorrelation artifact removal for optical coherence tomography (OCT) is presented using a custom-designed parallel spectral-domain OCT (SD-OCT) instrument. Our real-time method is based on time-averaged sampling of a sinusoidal phase modulation in the reference arm. Unlike other existing methods, our technique can completely eliminate arbitrarily located, arbitrarily strong autocorrelation artifacts.