Photonic compressive sensing enabled data efficient time stretch optical coherence tomography

Photonic time stretch (PTS) has enabled real time spectral domain optical coherence tomography (OCT). However, this method generates a torrent of massive data at GHz stream rate, which requires capturing as per Nyquist principle. If the OCT interferogram signal is sparse in Fourier domain, which is always true for samples with limited number of layers, it can be captured at lower (sub-Nyquist) acquisition rate as per compressive sensing method. In this work we report a data compressed PTS-OCT system based on photonic compressive sensing with 66% compression with low acquisition rate of 50MHz and measurement speed of 1.51MHz per depth profile. A new method has also been proposed to improve the system with all-optical random pattern generation, which completely avoids electronic bottleneck in traditional binary pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) generators.