Comparative study of optical sources in the near infrared for optical coherence tomography applications.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a powerful, noninvasive biomedical technique that uses low-coherence light sources to obtain in-depth scans of biological tissues. We report results obtained with three different sources emitting at 1570, 1330, and 810 nm, respectively. Attenuation and backscattering measurements are obtained with these sources for several in vitro biological tissues. From these measurements, we use a graphical method to make comparisons of the penetration depth and backscattering intensity of each wavelength for the studied samples. The influence of the coherence length of each source is also taken into account in order to make a more relevant comparison.