Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Microscopy with Computational Adaptive Optics for High-Resolution Tomography of Scattering Tissue

Abstract

Interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM) is a computed imaging technique to overcome the depth-of-field limitations in optical coherence tomography/microscopy (OCT/OCM). However, the presence of optical aberrations (which typically increase with NA) can degrade the resolution of ISAM reconstructions. We demonstrate a computational adaptive optics (CAO) method to correct aberrations of a virtual (or computed) pupil. Three-dimensional datasets in rabbit muscle tissue show that ISAM with CAO astigmatism correction results in a higher resolution reconstruction than uncorrected ISAM or standard OCT/OCM. We also present our work on high-speed 2D and pseudo-3D ISAM reconstruction using a graphic processing unit (GPU). These results demonstrate ISAM with computational aberration correction in highly scattering tissue. They also demonstrate that with precise high-speed scanning, volumetric ISAM can be performed without phase noise correction, and suggest that with GPU-based processing, real-time volumetric ISAM is feasible.