A hybrid imaging system combines a modified optical imaging system and a digital postprocessing step. We describe a spatial-domain method for designing a pupil phase plate to extend the depth of field of an incoherent hybrid imaging system with a rectangular aperture. We use this method to obtain a pupil phase plate to extend the depth of field, which we refer to as a logarithmic phase plate. Introducing a logarithmic phase plate at the exit pupil of a simulated diffraction-limited system and digitally processing the detector's output extend the depth of field by an order of magnitude more than the Hopkins defocus criterion. We also examine the effect of using a charge-coupled device optical detector, instead of an ideal optical detector, on the extension of the depth of field. Finally, we compare the performance of the logarithmic phase plate with that of a cubic phase plate in extending the depth of field of a hybrid imaging system with a rectangular aperture.

Abstract:We developed an importance sampling based method that significantly speeds up the calculation of the diffusive reflectance due to ballistic and to quasi-ballistic components of photons scattered in turbid media: Class I diffusive reflectance. These components of scattered photons make up the signal in optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging. We show that the use of this method reduces the computation time of this diffusive reflectance in time-domain OCT by up to three orders of magnitude when compared with standard Monte Carlo simulation. Our method does not produce a systematic bias in the statistical result that is typically observed in existing methods to speed up Monte Carlo simulations of light transport in tissue. This fast Monte Carlo calculation of the Class I diffusive reflectance can be used as a tool to further study the physical process governing OCT signals, e.g., obtain the statistics of the depth-scan, including the effects of multiple scattering of light, in OCT. This is an important prerequisite to future research to increase penetration depth and to improve image extraction in OCT. Med. Phys. 10(6), 824-830 (1983). 9. L. Wang, S. L. Jacques, and L. Zheng, "MCML--Monte Carlo modeling of light transport in multi-layered tissues," Comput. Methods Programs Biomed. 47(2), 131-146 (1995). 10. N. G. Chen and J. Bai, "Estimation of quasi-straightforward propagating light in tissues," Phys. Med. Biol. 44(7), 1669-1676 (1999). 11. N. Chen, "Controlled Monte Carlo method for light propagation in tissue of semi-infinite geometry," Appl. Opt.46(10), 1597-1603 (2007

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Abstract:The Debye-Wolf electromagnetic diffraction integral is now routinely used to describe focusing by high numerical (NA) lenses. We obtain an eigenfunction expansion of the electric vector field in the focal region in terms of Bessel and generalized prolate spheroidal functions. Our representation has many optimal and desirable properties which offer considerable simplification to the evaluation and analysis of the DebyeWolf integral. It is potentially also useful in implementing two-dimensional apodization techniques to synthesize electromagnetic field distributions in the focal region of a high NA lenses. Our work is applicable to many areas, such as optical microscopy, optical data storage and lithography. 2281-2292 (2003). 11. C. J. R. Sheppard and P. Török, "Efficient calculation of electromagnetic diffraction in optical systems using a multipole expansion," J. Mod. Opt. 44, 803-818 (1997