Abstract
We present a method, based on a single scattering model, to calculate the attenuation coefficient of each pixel in optical coherence tomography (OCT) depth profiles. Numerical simulations were used to determine the model's response to different depths and attenuation coefficients. Experiments were performed on uniform and layered phantoms with varying attenuation coefficients. They were measured by a 1300 nm OCT system and their attenuation coefficients were evaluated by our proposed method and by fitting the OCT slope as the gold standard. Both methods showed largely consistent results for the uniform phantoms. On the layered phantom, only our proposed method accurately estimated the attenuation coefficients. For all phantoms, the proposed method largely reduced the variability of the estimated attenuation coefficients. The method was illustrated on an in-vivo retinal OCT scan, effectively removing common imaging artifacts such as shadowing. By providing localized, per-pixel attenuation coefficients, this method enables tissue characterization based on attenuation coefficient estimates from OCT data.
Highlights
The power of a coherent light beam propagating through a turbid medium is attenuated along its path due to scattering and absorption
Attenuation coefficients were measured by optical methods, including optical coherence tomography (OCT), for application such as atherosclerotic plaque characterization [5,6,7], cancer in axillary lymph node [8], renal tumor tissue [9,10], oral cancer [11], rectal cancer [12] and glaucoma diagnosis and monitoring [13, 14]
We presented a method for depth-resolved reconstruction of attenuation coefficients from OCT data that is based on a single-scattering model
Summary
The power of a coherent light beam propagating through a turbid medium is attenuated along its path due to scattering and absorption. Attenuation coefficients were found to correlate with apoptosis [15] and necrosis [16] and were different between nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) cell lines [17, 18] These applications emphasize the importance of determining the spatially resolved attenuation coefficient in heterogeneous scattering biological tissue. We present an approach to determine the depth-resolved attenuation coefficient from OCT data and experimentally verify the method on multi-layered scattering phantoms. It is based on a single-scattering model and exploits the common property in OCT imaging that the majority of the light is attenuated within the imaging depth range. It illustrates the method’s robustness to shadowing and other common OCT imaging artifacts
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