Purpose: We present the design of a new low-cost optical coherence tomography (OCT) system and compare its retinal imaging capabilities to a standard commercial system through a clinical study. Methods: A spectral-domain OCT system was designed using various cost-reduction techniques to be low-cost, highly portable, and completely stand-alone. Clinical imaging was performed on 120 eyes of 60 patients (60 eyes of normal volunteers and 60 eyes with retinal disease) using both the low-cost OCT and a Heidelberg Engineering Spectralis OCT. Contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) was measured from resulting images to determine system performance. Results: The low-cost OCT system was successfully applied to clinical imaging of the retina. The system offers an axial resolution of 8.0 lm, a lateral resolution of 19.6 lm, and an imaging depth of 2.7 mm for a 6.6-mm field of view in the X and Y directions. Total cost is $5037, a significant size reduction compared to current commercial higher performance systems. Mean CNR value of low-cost OCT images is only 5.6% lower compared to the Heidelberg Spectralis. Conclusions: The images captured with the low-cost OCT were of adequate resolution and allowed for clinical diagnostics. It offers comparable performance as a retinal screening tool at a fraction of the cost of current commercial systems.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a powerful optical imaging technique capable of visualizing the internal structure of biological tissues at near cellular resolution. For years, OCT has been regarded as the standard of care in ophthalmology, acting as an invaluable tool for the assessment of retinal pathology. However, the costly nature of most current commercial OCT systems has limited its general accessibility, especially in low-resource environments. It is therefore timely to review the development of low-cost OCT systems as a route for applying this technology to population-scale disease screening. Low-cost, portable and easy to use OCT systems will be essential to facilitate widespread use at point of care settings while ensuring that they offer the necessary imaging performances needed for clinical detection of retinal pathology. The development of low-cost OCT also offers the potential to enable application in fields outside ophthalmology by lowering the barrier to entry. In this paper, we review the current development and applications of low-cost, portable and handheld OCT in both translational and research settings. Design and cost-reduction techniques are described for general low-cost OCT systems, including considerations regarding spectrometer-based detection, scanning optics, system control, signal processing, and the role of 3D printing technology. Lastly, a review of clinical applications enabled by low-cost OCT is presented, along with a detailed discussion of current limitations and outlook.

Speckle is an intrinsic noise of interferometric signals which reduces contrast and degrades the quality of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Here, we present a frequency compounding speckle reduction technique using the dual window (DW) method. Using the DW method, speckle noise is reduced without the need to acquire multiple frames. A ~25% improvement in the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) was achieved using the DW speckle reduction method with only minimal loss (~17%) in axial resolution. We also demonstrate that real-time speckle reduction can be achieved at a B-scan rate of ~21 frames per second using a graphic processing unit (GPU). The DW speckle reduction technique can work on any existing OCT instrument without further system modification or extra components. This makes it applicable both in real-time imaging systems and during post-processing.

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For many clinical applications, such as dermatology, optical coherence tomography (OCT) suffers from limited penetration depth due primarily to the highly scattering nature of biological tissues. Here, we present a novel implementation of dual-axis optical coherence tomography (DA-OCT) that offers improved depth penetration in skin imaging at 1.3 µm compared to conventional OCT. Several unique aspects of DA-OCT are examined here, including the requirements for scattering properties to realize the improvement and the limited depth of focus (DOF) inherent to the technique. To overcome this limitation, our approach uses a tunable lens to coordinate focal plane selection with image acquisition to create an enhanced DOF for DA-OCT. This improvement in penetration depth is quantified experimentally against conventional on-axis OCT using tissue phantoms and mouse skin. The results presented here suggest the potential use of DA-OCT in situations where a high degree of scattering limits depth penetration in OCT imaging.