High Power and High Resolution Near-Infrared Light Source for Optical Coherence Tomography Using Glass Phosphor and Light Emitting Diode

We have fabricated a novel near-infrared light source for optical coherence tomography (OCT) using a glass phosphor and a light emitting diode (LED) as the excitation source. We used 1.0Yb2O3–4.0Nd2O3–47.0Bi2O3–47.0B2O3–1.0Sb2O3 glass as the phosphor to obtain wideband light emission around 1000 nm. We observed a full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) as wide as 98 nm with an output power as high as 1 mW. The interference signal showed a coherence length of 4.6 µm. This value indicates that the depth resolution of the OCT is twice as high as that of conventional LEDs and super luminescent diodes (SLDs).