Towards automatic calibration of Fourier-domain OCT for robot-assisted vitreoretinal surgery

We present a new real-time automatic spectral calibration (ASC) method for Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FD OCT) that can be automatically performed by the system. The ASC method proposed can be performed during OCT scanning operation and does not require an external calibrating light source or a commercial optical spectrum analyzer. Spectral data used for calibration can be interferograms obtained from an arbitrary sample which may have complicated internal structures, such as ones found in biological tissue. Moreover, our ASC method incorporates known robot motion to calibrate physical pixel spacing of the A-scan in static or dynamic environments. Experimental results show that our ASC method can provide high-performance calibration for FD OCT in terms of axial resolution and ranging accuracy without increasing hardware complexity.