OCT speckle carries information on sub-cellular tissue structures, and speckle statistics have been shown to be potential biomarkers in tissue characterization for disease detection and monitoring. Current methods for estimating speckle parameters use simple methods in which speckle statistics are determined inside a fixed kernel, which makes them unsuitable in heterogeneous tissue and have a clear trade-off between accuracy and spatial resolution. These limitations make them unsuitable for automatically detecting spatially-resolved differences in cellular microstructure that occurs in a diseased tissue. To address this unmet need, we have developed an algorithm based on a probabilistic approach to automatically select kernels consisting of pixels that have a high probability of sharing the same speckle probability density function and use them to estimate spatially-resolved speckle parameters using likelihood-based estimation. Our proposed method enables new capabilities in producing speckle parametric images, providing information on spatial variability of speckle distribution throughout OCT volumes and additional information to structural OCT imaging.
Simulated data plays an important role in the process of developing and testing new processing methods in optical coherence tomography (OCT); they provide ground truths, and enable the generation of large amounts of data with high diversity in terms of tissue and system properties, without the burdens of experimental acquisitions. Here, we present an open-source MATLAB simulation tool that allows the generation of synthetic OCT data in an efficient and versatile way, while modeling the most relevant characteristics of the OCT signal, by combining the well-known forward model of OCT imaging with scattering and polarization properties of tissue.
For OCTA to become a widespread tool in the ophthalmic clinic, the significant increase in acquisition time must be kept at a minimum. Therefore, we developed a new OCTA processing pipeline that enables 4D coherent averaging and leverages from it to improve angiography contrast without using more repetitions.
We first present a new metric for computing angiography contrast that exploits both spatial and time coherence, g1C, which significantly reduce phase noise while using minimal repetitions for averaging. We then show, for the first time, how to perform advanced image registration to correct for motion between repetitions while maintaining phase coherency.
Speckle reduction has been an active topic of interest in the Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) community and several techniques have been developed ranging from hardware-based methods, conventional image-processing and deep-learning based methods. The main goal of speckle reduction is to improve the diagnostic utility of OCT images by enhancing the image quality, thereby enhancing the visual interpretation of anatomical structures. We have previously introduced a probabilistic despeckling method based on non-local means for OCT—Tomographic Non-local-means despeckling (TNode). We demonstrated that this method efficiently suppresses speckle contrast while preserving tissue structures with dimensions approaching the system resolution. Despite the merits of this method, it is computationally very expensive: processing a typical retinal OCT volume takes a few hours. A much faster version of TNode with close to real-time performance, while keeping with the open source nature of TNode, could find much greater use in the OCT community. Deep learning despeckling methods have been proposed in OCT, including variants of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGAN) and convolutional neural networks CNN. However, most of these methods have used B-scan compounding as a ground truth, which presents significant limitations in terms of speckle reduced tomograms with preservation of resolution. In addition, all these methods have focused on speckle suppression of individual B-scans, and their performance on volumetric tomograms is unclear: the expectation is that three-dimensional manipulations of these processed tomograms (i.e., en face projections) will contain artifacts due to the B-scan-wise processing, disrupting the continuity of tissue structures along the slow-scan axis. In addition, speckle suppression based on individual B-scans cannot provide the neural network with information on volumetric structures in the training data, and thus is expected to perform poorly on small structures. Indeed, most deep-learning despeckling works have focused on image quality metrics based on demonstrating strong speckle suppression, rather than focusing on preservation of contrast and small tissue structures. To overcome these problems, we propose an entire workflow to enable the wide-spread use of deep-learning speckle suppression in OCT: the ground-truth is generated using volumetric TNode despeckling, and the neural network uses a new cGAN that receives OCT partial volumes as inputs to utilize the three-dimensional structural information for speckle reduction. Because of its reliance on TNode for generating ground-truth data, this hybrid deep-learning–TNode (DL-TNode) framework will be made available to the OCT community to enable easy training and implementation in a multitude of OCT systems without relying on specialty-acquired training data.
Birefringence of the retinal nerve fiber has the potential as a useful biomarker for the study of neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis. To realize this potential and assist in the development of diagnostic tools and therapies for neurodegenerative diseases, high-resolution retinal polarimetry suitable for humans and rodent models is needed. However, conventional polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) processing generally imposes a resolution penalty by spatially filtering incoherent Stokes vectors, or the underlying coherent Jones-based OCT measurements. Here, we demonstrate the possibility to resolve polarimetric parameters of individual axonal bundles in-vivo with our probabilistic non-local means processing for Stokes-based PS-OCT.
We present computational refocusing in polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) to improve spatial resolution in the calculated polarimetric parameters and extending the depth-of-field in PS-OCT. To achieve this, we successfully integrated SHARP, a computational aberration correction method compatible with phase unstable systems, into a PS-OCT system with inter--A-line polarization modulation. Together with the spectral binning technique to mitigate chromatic polarization effects in system components, we show image quality enhancement in tissue polarimetry of swine eye anterior segment ex vivo, demonstrating the potential of computational refocusing in PS-OCT.
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