Astigmatism corrected common path probe for optical coherence tomography

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Optical coherence tomography (OCT) catheters for intraluminal imaging are subject to various artifacts due to reference-sample arm dispersion imbalances and sample arm beam astigmatism. The goal of this work was to develop a probe that minimizes such artifacts. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Our probe was fabricated using a single mode fiber at the tip of which a glass spacer and graded index objective lens were spliced to …