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Abstract

Lead by the original idea to perform noninvasive optical biopsies of various tissues, optical coherence tomography
found numerous medical applications
within the last two decades. The interference
based imaging technique opens the
possibility to visualise subcellular morphology up to an imaging depth of 3 mm
and up to micron level axial and lateral
resolution. The birefringence properties
of the tissue are visualisedwith enhanced
contrast using polarisation sensitive or
cross-polarised optical coherence tomography (OCT) techniques. Although, it
requires strict control over the polarisation states, resulting in several polarisation
controlling elements. In this work, we propose a novel input-polarisation independent endoscopic system based on cross-polarised OCT. We tested the feasibility of our approach by measuring the polarisation change from a quarter-wave plate for different rotational angles. Further performance tests reveal a lateral resolution of 30 μm and a sensitivity of 103 dB. Images of the human nail bed and cow muscle tissue demonstrate the potential of the system to measure structural and birefringence properties of the tissue endoscopically.