Abstract
BackgroundOptical coherence tomography (OCT) is a minimally invasive imaging technique, which utilizes the spatial and temporal coherence properties of optical waves backscattered from biological material. Recent advances in tunable lasers and infrared camera technologies have enabled an increase in the OCT imaging speed by a factor of more than 100, which is important for retinal imaging where we wish to study fast physiological processes in the biological tissue. However, the high scanning rate causes proportional decrease of the detector exposure time, resulting in a reduction of the system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). One approach to improving the image quality of OCT tomograms acquired at high speed is to compensate for the noise component in the images without compromising the sharpness of the image details.MethodsIn this study, we propose a novel reconstruction method for rapid OCT image acquisitions, based on a noise-compensated homotopic modified James-Stein non-local regularized optimization strategy. The performance of the algorithm was tested on a series of high resolution OCT images of the human retina acquired at different imaging rates.ResultsQuantitative analysis was used to evaluate the performance of the algorithm using two state-of-art denoising strategies. Results demonstrate significant SNR improvements when using our proposed approach when compared to other approaches.ConclusionsA new reconstruction method based on a noise-compensated homotopic modified James-Stein non-local regularized optimization strategy was developed for the purpose of improving the quality of rapid OCT image acquisitions. Preliminary results show the proposed method shows considerable promise as a tool to improve the visualization and analysis of biological material using OCT.
Highlights
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a minimally invasive imaging technique, which utilizes the spatial and temporal coherence properties of optical waves backscattered from biological material
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) [1] is a minimally invasive imaging technique, based on low-coherence interferometry, that utilizes the spatial and temporal coherence properties of optical waves backscattered from biological tissue
Since OCT is based on the detection of partially coherent light, speckle noise is an inherent component of any OCT tomogram [4]
Summary
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a minimally invasive imaging technique, which utilizes the spatial and temporal coherence properties of optical waves backscattered from biological material. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) [1] is a minimally invasive imaging technique, based on low-coherence interferometry, that utilizes the spatial and temporal coherence properties of optical waves backscattered from biological tissue. The presence of speckle can affect negatively the performance of other image processing algorithms such as feature segmentation [5] and pattern recognition Since speckle contains both information about the structure and optical properties of the imaged object and a noise component, different approaches were utilized in the past to suppress speckle noise and improve the image quality [4,6,7,8]
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