Design and optimization of a spectrometer for Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

There are several factors such as the chosen optical source, central wavelength, spectral bandwidth, spectrometer optical components and the detector specifications that affect the overall performance of a spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) imaging system. Among these factors a good design and implementation of the spectrometer is of paramount importance as it directly affects the system resolution, sensitivity fall-off, maximum imaging depth, SNR and in general the system performance. This study demonstrates the design steps and some considerations during the design of a spectrometer. The imaging performance of this design is assessed. The obtained experimental results prove an improvement of the overall performance of the common path SD-OCT imaging system and agree with the expected outcome from the design stage.