828 kHz retinal imaging with an 840 nm Fourier domain mode locked laser

This paper presents a Fourier domain mode locked (FDML) laser centered around 840x2005;nm. It features a bidirectional sweep repetition rate of 828 kHz and a spectral bandwidth of 40x2005;nm. An axial resolution of x223C;9.9 x00B5;m in water and a 1.4x2005;cm sensitivity roll-off are achieved. Utilizing a complex master-slave (CMS) recalibration method and due to a sufficiently high sensitivity of 84.6x2005;dB, retinal layers of the human eye in-vivo can be resolved during optical coherence tomography (OCT) examination. The developed FDML laser enables acquisition rates of 3D-volumes with a size of 200x2009;x00D7;x2009;100x2009;x00D7;x2009;256 voxels in under 100 milliseconds. Detailed information on the FDML implementation, its challenging design tasks, and OCT images obtained with the laser are presented in this paper.