Numerically focused optical coherence microscopy with structured illumination aperture

In optical coherence microscopy (OCM) with a given numerical aperture (NA) of the objectives the transverse resolution can be increased by increasing the numerical aperture of illumination (NAi). However, this may also lead to attenuation of the signal with defocus preventing the effective numerically focused 3D imaging of the required sample volume. This paper presents an approach to structuring the illumination aperture, which allows combining the advantages of increased transverse resolution (peculiar to high NAi) with small attenuation of the signal with defocus (peculiar to low NAi) for high-resolution numerically focused 3D imaging in OCM.