A comparative study of noise in supercontinuum light sources for ultra-high resolution optical coherence tomography

Supercontinuum (SC) light is a well-established technology, which finds applications in several domains ranging from chemistry to material science and imaging systems [1-2]. More specifically, its ultra-wide optical bandwidth and high average power make it an ideal tool for Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT).

Over the last 5 years, numerous examples have demonstrated its high potential [3-4] in this context. However, SC light sources present pulse-to-pulse intensity variation that can limit the performance of any OCT system [5] by degrading their signal to noise ratio (SNR). To this goal, we have studied and compared the noise of several SC light sources and evaluated how their noise properties affect the performance of Ultra-High Resolution OCT (UHR-OCT) at 1300 nm.

We have measured several SC light sources with different parameters (pulse length, energy, seed repetition rate, etc.). We illustrate the different noise measurements and their impact on a state of the art UHR-OCT system producing images of skin. The sensitivity of the system was higher than 95 dB, with an axial resolution below 4μm.