Compressive-sensing swept-source optical coherence tomography angiography with reduced noise

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Imaging
• Optical Coherence Tomography
• Angiography

Background:

• Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is crucial for clinical diagnostics.
• Current OCTA methods are limited by motion artifacts and noise.
• Improving OCTA image quality and speed is essential for clinical applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To implement compressive sensing (CS) on B-scans to reduce motion artifact in OCTA.
• To develop a novel noise reduction filter for enhanced OCTA imaging.
• To evaluate the effectiveness of CS and the developed filter on in vivo human skin OCTA images.

Main Methods:

• Compressive sensing (CS) was applied to B-scans to increase the B-scan rate and mitigate motion artifacts.
• A specialized noise reduction filter was designed, integrating CS, Gaussian, and median filtering techniques.
• CS filtering involved averaging multiple repetitions on en-face OCTA images with varied sampling functions.

Main Results:

• Vasculature structures were successfully reconstructed using CS on B-scans at a 70% sampling rate.
• The developed noise reduction filter significantly eliminated noise in the OCTA images.
• The proposed method demonstrated effective artifact reduction and noise suppression.

Conclusions:

• Compressive sensing on B-scans can effectively reduce motion artifacts in OCTA.
• The combined CS, Gaussian, and median filter significantly improves OCTA image quality by reducing noise.
• This approach holds potential for expediting OCTA imaging and enhancing diagnostic capabilities.