Partially coherent illumination in full-field interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy

A model is developed for optical coherence tomography and interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM) systems employing full-field frequency-scanned illumination with partial spatial coherence. This model is used to derive efficient ISAM inverse scattering algorithms that give diffraction-limited resolution in regions typically regarded as out of focus. Partial spatial coherence of the source is shown to have the advantage of mitigating multiple-scattering effects that can otherwise produce significant artifacts in full-field coherent imaging.