Elimination of Artifacts Caused by the Nonidentity of Parallel Signal-Reception Channels in Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

Abstract

We study the causes of artifact appearance in the images obtained by the method of spectral domain optical coherence tomography with parallel reception of the optical-spectrum components, which are manifested in repetition and overlay of the structural elements of the images of the studied medium with a shift in depth. It is shown that nonidentity of the transfer characteristics of the channels of the multichannel photoreceiving elements is one of the sources of such artifacts. A numerical method for eliminating such artifacts is proposed and experimentally verified. This method is based on using the models whose parameters are estimated by the recorded signal and does not require a priori information on the transfer characteristics of the channels. The method efficiency is demonstrated during the experiments on the in vivo visualization of the human middle-ear elements.