An optical coherence tomography (OCT) system including a polarizing
splitter disposed to direct light in an interferometer such that the OCT
detector operates in a noise-optimized regime. When scanning an eye, the
system detector simultaneously produces a low-frequency component
representing a scanning laser ophthalmoscope-like (SLO-like) image pixel
and a high frequency component representing a two-dimensional (2D) OCT en
face image pixel of each point. The SLO-like image is unchanging with
depth, so that the pixels in each SLO-like image may be quickly realigned
with the previous SLO-like image by consulting prominent image features
(e.g., vessels) should lateral eye motion shift an OCT en face image
during recording. Because of the pixel-to-pixel correspondence between
the simultaneous OCT and SLO-like images, the OCT image pixels may be
remapped on the fly according to the corresponding SLO-like image pixel
remapping to create an undistorted 3D image data set for the scanned
region.