Measuring the refractive index and thickness of multilayer samples by Fourier domain optical coherence tomography

Abstract: Non-contact measurement of the refractive index and thickness of multilayer biological tissues is of great significance for biomedical applications and can greatly improve medical diagnosis and treatment. In this work, we introduce a theoretical method to simultaneously extract the above information using a Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) system, in which no additional arrangement and prior information about the object is required other than the OCT interference spectrum. The single reflection components can be extracted from the observed spectrum by isolating the primary spikes in the sample reflectance profile, and then the refractive index and thickness can be obtained by fitting the actual and modeled values of the single reflection spectrum. In a two-layer sample example, the simulation results show that our method can reconstruct the results with high accuracy. The relative error is within 0.01%. The complexity of our approach grows linearly with the number of sample layers, making it well-adapted to multilayer situations. Our method takes into account both single and multiple reflections in multilayer samples and is therefore equally applicable to samples with high refractive index contrast.