A practical approach to eliminate autocorrelation artefacts for volume-rate spectral domain optical coherence tomography

A simple method is introduced to eliminate the autocorrelation artefacts in ultrafast spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SOCT) by use of the ensemble average of spectra within an individual B scan as the background signal, and then subtracting this from all the A scans within that B scan before performing the FFTs. This is updated continuously frame by frame. The method is tested on a volume-rate (C-mode) SOCT system to image the human fingertip in vivo with a volume rate at 8 s.