Multicore fibres for spatial offset optical coherence tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) represents a tremendous potential for disease diagnostics and image-guided surgery if the technology could be utilized clinically in-vivo. Therefore, interest in endoscopic OCT has grown rapidly due to technological advances and availability of the first commercial technologies.
However, at depth rapid signal attenuation due to multiple scattering diminishes imaging contrast and leads to obscured morphology. Decoupling illumination and collection fields by introducing a spatial offset has demonstrated the preferential collection of multiple scattered light and thereby improving contrast at depth.
In multicore fibres (MCFs), the core pitch provides a natural spatial offset for decoupling the illumination and collection fields. We investigate using a multicore fibre (MCF) for decoupling said fields towards common-path spatial offset OCT (SO-OCT) implementation.
The initial results indicate that MCFs provide decoupling of the illumination and collection fields as expected. We compare with conventional endoscopic designs for common-path OCT implementation and propose a novel design for optimized MCF-based imaging.