Cross-attention learning enables real-time nonuniform rotational distortion correction in OCT

Nonuniform rotational distortion (NURD) correction is vital for endoscopic optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging and its functional extensions, such as angiography and elastography. Current NURD correction methods require time-consuming feature tracking/registration or cross-correlation calculations and thus sacrifice temporal resolution. Here we propose a cross-attention learning method for the NURD correction in OCT. Our method is inspired by the recent success of the self-attention mechanism in natural language processing and computer vision. By leveraging its ability to model long-range dependencies, we can directly obtain the spatial correlation between OCT A-lines at any distance, thus accelerating the NURD correction. We develop an end-to-end stacked cross-attention network and design three types of optimization constraints. We compare our method with two traditional feature-based methods and a CNN-based method on two publicly-available endoscopic OCT datasets. We further verify the NURD correction performance of our method on 3D stent reconstruction using a home-built endoscopic OCT system. Our method achieves a ∼3 × speedup to real time (26 ± 3 fps), and superior correction performance.