Noise-compensated homotopic non-local regularized reconstruction for rapid retinal optical coherence tomography image acquisitions

BMC Medical Imaging

Technical Advance

Hongxia Bie¹  Chenyi Liu²  Kostadinka Bizheva²  Paul Fieguth³  Alexander Wong³ 

[1] Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China;Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada;Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada;

关键词: Optical Coherence Tomography;    Optical Coherence Tomography Image;    Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transformation;    Complex Wavelet Transformation;    Noise Compensation;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2342-14-37

 received in 2014-06-04, accepted in 2014-10-03,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Liu et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.