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It is known that lateral resolution and depth of focus (DOF) in an optical imaging system are coupled, and a compromise between them has to be made. In this Letter, we propose to resolve the trade-off between lateral resolution and the DOF by a synthetic effective point spread function in optical path length (OPL) domain. A quasi-needle-like focus is synthesized by optical coherence tomography. We demonstrate that the synthesized quasi-needle-like focus provides a four-fold extension of a conventional DOF, while maintaining a high lateral resolution of 2.5 μm over a depth range of approximately 240 μm. The focal range can be further extended with more optical path length coded beams for synthesis involved.

A high-efficiency lensless all-fiber probe for optical coherence tomography (OCT) is presented. The probe is composed of a segment of large-core multimode fiber (MMF), a segment of tapered MMF, and a length of single-mode fiber (SMF). A controllable output beam can be designed by a simple adjustment of its probe structure parameters (PSPs), instead of the selection of fibers with different optical parameters. A side-view probe with a diameter of 340 μm and a rigid length of 6.37 mm was fabricated, which provides an effective imaging range of ∼0.6 mm with a full width at half-maximum beam diameter of less than 30 μm. The insertion loss of the probe was measured to be 0.81 dB, ensuring a high sensitivity of 102.25 dB. Satisfactory images were obtained by the probe-based OCT system, demonstrating the feasibility of the probe for endoscopic OCT applications.