Rapid Dispersion Compensation and Dispersion Measurement in Optical Coherence Tomography

Dispersion mismatch in optical coherence tomography (OCT) degrades image quality and the resolution for biological microstructures. Traditional compensation strategies predominantly rely on exhaustive search (ES) algorithms, which is computationally inefficient and time-consuming. In addition, the lack of efficient dispersion measurement methods for biological samples limits clinical OCT applications. This study proposes a rapid dispersion compensation and measurement strategy that improves both compensation efficiency and measurement accuracy. For compensation, a dual-stage collaborative optimization framework integrating coarse ES with the Nelder-Mead (NM) simplex algorithm is developed, enabling global localization followed by efficient local refinement. Compared with ES and goldensection search (GSS), the proposed strategy reduces convergence time by 98.2% and 68.2%, respectively, without accuracy degradation. For dispersion measurement, experiments on optical glasses within the same framework show good agreement with the ground truth. For 1 mm thick BaF2 and H-K9L glasses, errors of the extracted dispersion coefficients are 2.97 fs2/mm and 1.45 fs2/mm, respectively. In vivo imaging further demonstrates rapid operation in complex biological tissues, with a typical operation time required for dispersion measurement as low as 0.9 s for anterior chamber analysis and 0.5 s for retinal imaging on a laptop using an unoptimized single-threaded program. The proposed strategy integrates high compensation efficiency with accurate extraction capabilities, offering a robust solution for clinical OCT imaging and disease screening based on tissue dispersion characterization.