Abstract
A numerical deconvolution method to cancel lateral defocus in Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) is presented. This method uses a depth-dependent lateral point spread function and some approximations to design a deconvolution filter for the cancellation of lateral defocus. Improved lateral resolutions are theoretically estimated; consequently, the effect of lateral superresolution in this method is derived. The superresolution is experimentally confirmed by a razor blade test, and an intuitive physical interpretation of this effect is presented. The razor blade test also confirms that this method enhances the signal-to-noise ratio of OCT. This method is applied to OCT images of medical samples, in vivo human anterior eye segments, and exhibits its potential to cancel the defocusing of practical OCT images. The validity and restrictions involved in each approximation employed to design the deconvolution filter are discussed. A chromatic and a two-dimensional extensions of this method are also described.
Highlights
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been widely studied since its invention [1], and applied to various aspects of biomedical tomography
An Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) image comprises complex signals, the amplitude and phase of the image are available, while relatively elaborate schemes or algorithms are required to obtain the phase of timedomain OCT (TD-OCT) image [21,22]
We presented a numerical lateral deconvolution method to cancel the defocusing in OCT images
Summary
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been widely studied since its invention [1], and applied to various aspects of biomedical tomography. With extremely broadband light sources, microscopic OCT, namely, an optical coherence microscope that has a depth resolution of few micrometers [2] or sub-micrometers [3], has been demonstrated Another major topic of research in OCT is Fourier/spectral domain OCT (FD/SD-OCT) [4, 5]. We demonstrate a phase deconvolution method for FD-OCT This method is a lateral-oriented and non-iterative linear deconvolution method and manipulates the spatial frequency components of a complex OCT image. This method enhances the signal power, but not the noise power, further, it improves the lateral resolution over the transform-limited resolution (superresolution). A few limitations of this method that takes into account the approximations employed in the designing process of the deconvolution filter, and some possible extensions of this method are discussed
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