Digital dispersion compensation in optical coherence tomography

We present and experimentally demonstrate a novel dispersion compensation algorithm for optical coherence tomography that can account for both material and delay-line induced dispersion. It is a fast Fourier transform based algorithm that simultaneously corrects for the dispersion at all depths in a material, so that longer scan ranges are possible than can be compensated by optically correcting the dispersion at a particular depth. Such an algorithm becomes necessary when large bandwidth illumination or a large scan range is employed. We validate the algorithm by correcting the OCT measurements of a multilayered transparent PDMS (polydimethyl siloxane) microfluidic device.