Blur resolved OCT: full-range interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy through dispersion encoding

Abstract: We present a computational method for full-range interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM) under dispersion encoding. With this, one can effectively double the depth range of optical coherence tomography (OCT), whilst dramatically enhancing the spatial resolution away from the focal plane. To this end, we propose a model-based iterative reconstruction (MBIR) method, where ISAM is directly considered in an optimization approach, and we make the discovery that sparsity promoting regularization effectively recovers the full-range signal. Within this work, we adopt an optimal nonuniform discrete fast Fourier transform (NUFFT) implementation of ISAM, which is both fast and numerically stable throughout iterations. We validate our method with several complex samples, scanned with a commercial SD-OCT system with no hardware modification. With this, we both demonstrate full-range ISAM imaging, and significantly outperform combinations of existing methods.