Noise reduction in supercontinuum sources for OCT by single-pulse spectral normalization

Supercontinuum (SC) sources offer high illumination power from a single mode fiber with large spectral bandwidth including the visible spectrum, a growing application area for Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). However, SC spectra suffer from pulse-to-pulse variations, increasing noise in the resulting images. By simultaneously collecting a normalization spectrum, OCT image noise can be reduced by more than half (7 dB) for single pulses without any pulse averaging using only simple optical components.