In vitro birefringence imaging with spectral domain polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

Spectral domain polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (SDPS-OCT) is a depth-resolved polarization-sensitive interferometry which integrates polarization optics into spectral domain optical co-herence tomography (SD-OCT). This configuration can obtain birefringence information of samples and improve the imaging speed. In this paper, horizontally polarized light is used to replace natural light of the source. Then, right-rotated circularly polarized light is the incident sample light. To obtain two orthogonal components of the polarized interferogram, the reflected light of the reference arm is set to be 45° linearly polarized light. These two components are acquired by two spectrometers synchronously. The system was employed to achieve 12.8-#m axial resolution and 4.36-#m transverse resolution. We have imaged in vitro chicken tendon and muscle tissues with these system.