Digital phase stabilization for improving sensitivity and degree of polarization accuracy in polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography

In a recent publication, Tomlins and Wang pointed out an SNR improvement that could be gained in optical coherence tomography (OCT), by altering the averaging scheme used. Specifically they noticed that, given a large number of noisy OCT A-scans, it is preferable if possible to perform the ensemble-averaging over the A-scans and then extract the OCT envelope rather than extract the envelope from each noisy A-scan and then average. In this paper we demonstrate that a similar argument can be applied to the calculation of the degree of polarization (DOP) using polarization-sensitive OCT. However, the difference now is that direct A-scan averaging can reduce the systematic error in DOP calculation that occurs in the presence of noise due to noise-bias terms.

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