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Polarization-sensitive OCT is used to examine tissue microstructure by providing imaging of
birefringent properties. Single-camera spectral-domain polarization-sensitive OCT has been of recent
interest, whereby a custom spectrometer is employed to simultaneously measure orthogonal polarization
states scattered from the sample. This avoids synchronization and triggering issues associated with
multiple-camera setups. It also has the advantage that the optic axis can be extracted without polarization
modulating the incident light. However, the disadvantage is that the line camera pixel-to-wavenumber
nonlinearity requires either careful spectrometer alignment, or digital compensation. In fact, this problem is further exacerbated in high resolution PSOCT systems as they require
compensation over larger bandwidths. Here we report the construction of an ultrabroad-bandwidth
PSOCT system using a single camera spectrometer similar to Baumann et al. In order to enjoy the
benefits of this instrument, we outline a method for digital dispersion compensation that removes the
necessity for special camera alignment. We find that there are three non-negligible types of dispersion to
consider: 1) the aforementioned camera pixel-to-wavenumber nonlinearity, 2) the refractive index
dispersion in the sample itself, and 3) the dispersion imbalance between the arms of the OCT
interferometer. The latter two were previously recognized for time-domain high-resolution OCT, where a
digital dispersion compensation method was successfully employed to treat them both. For our
SDOCT application, we find that dispersion types 1 and 2 have the same functional effect and can be
combined into one compensation step, and as such, much of the previous compensation method can be
used. However, we find that it is necessary to add two steps to the analysis technique whereby the
relative scaling and positioning of the two polarization images is adjusted to align the scatterers. We also
find that better results are achieved by fitting to larger polynomial orders. We show how our technique
provides high-resolution PSOCT with precise alignment between the orthogonal polarization images.
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