Reducing cost but not quality with digital scanner interfaces for optical coherence tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems are traditionally decomposed into engine and scanner components with an expensive and noise-prone analog interface to communicate the scan pattern between the two. To overcome these limitations, we implement a digital interface for our OCT system using low-cost embedded microprocessor and custom PC software. We demonstrate quantitative and qualitative equivalence of the interfaces to the theoretical optical resolution limits of our scanner through signal and image quality metrics, despite an order of magnitude reduction in cost. These results demonstrate the potential for reducing costs without sacrificing image quality through digital interfacing.