Patent ID: 8593641

Claim:
A method for generating an optical coherence tomography (OCT) image, the method comprising: producing light from a swept laser source; splitting the light into a first and a second portion, wherein the first portion is sent to an OCT interferometer to produce an OCT signal and the second portion is sent to a uniform frequency sample clock; processing the second portion into an external clock signal that is accepted by a digitizer, wherein processing comprises the steps of coupling the swept source laser to a uniform frequency sample clock generator and generating the clocking signal, wherein the uniform frequency sample clock generator further comprises a gas cell providing a metric on the absolute lasing wavelength at digitized sampling times and an optical wavemeter coupled to a digitizer providing the relationship between the sampling time and lasing wavelength, further comprising determining the wavenumber bias of the swept laser source; sending the OCT signal and the clock signal to the digitizer; and generating an OCT image from a combination of the OCT signal and the clock signal.