Automatic focus method using interference fringes magnitudes in retinal optical coherence tomography

In retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT), it is significant to focus the scan beam on the retina layers of the human eye fast to acquire high-quality OCT images. The refractive errors of the human eye are usually compensated by shifting the optical lens in the sample arm manually or electrically. Otherwise, refractive errors of the human eye will cause axial focal shift of the scanning beam and blur the OCT images. We propose a fast automatic focus method using the interference fringes magnitudes of the whole retinal layers to determine the best refractive correction position of motor-driven optical compensation lens without the aid of optical fundus imaging or OCT B-scan imaging. Also, the optical path difference between the sample arm and reference arm is adjusted in the spectral-domain OCT (SD-OCT) to reduce the effects of sensitivity roll-off. The experiments in the lab-built SD-OCT show that the average running time of the method is 15.2 s and the mean absolute deviation of each imaging is within 1 mm. The method is independent of extra optical setup and requires less computational consumption, which is suitable for low-cost and automatic retinal OCT devices.