Imaging speed of OCT is a crucial factor for various applications. In swept source OCT, the imaging speed is directly determined by the sweep repetition speed of the wavelength-swept laser. Recently, a stretched-pulse mode-locked (SPML) wavelength-swept laser has been developed, utilizing chromatic dispersion to generate the wavelength-swept output with repetition rates from a few MHz to over 10 MHz without using any mechanical filter. In this work, we investigated SPML lasers with various repetition rates of 10 MHz, 20 MHz, and 80 MHz utilizing 10 m (930 ps/nm), 5 m (465 ps/nm), and 1 m (93 ps/nm) long CFBGs, respectively. We present coherence length and relative intensity noise (RIN) performances of the SPML lasers with various speeds and show the comparison of images acquired using the SPML lasers of 10 MHz and 80 MHz repetition rates.
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