Optical Coherence Tomography imaging based on Non-Harmonic Analysis

A new processing technique called Non-Harmonic Analysis (NHA) is proposed for OCT imaging. Conventional Fourier-Domain OCT relies on the FFT calculation which depends on the window function and length. Axial resolution is counter proportional to the frame length of FFT that is limited by the swept range of the swept source in SS-OCT, or the pixel counts of CCD in SD-OCT degraded in FD-OCT. However, NHA process is intrinsically free from this trade-offs; NHA can resolve high frequency without being influenced by window function or frame length of sampled data. In this study, NHA process is explained and applied to OCT imaging and compared with OCT images based on FFT. In order to validate the benefit of NHA in OCT, we carried out OCT imaging based on NHA with the three different sample of onion-skin,human-skin and pig-eye. The results show that NHA process can realize practical image resolution that is equivalent to 100nm swept range only with less than half-reduced wavelength range.