Compressed intracellular motility via non-uniform temporal sampling in dynamic optical coherence tomography

Optical coherence tomography has great utility for capturing dynamic processes, but such applications are particularly data-intensive. Samples such as biological tissues exhibit temporal features at varying time scales, which makes data reduction challenging.

We propose a method for capturing short- and long-term correlations of a sample in a compressed way using non-uniform temporal sampling to reduce scan time and memory overhead.

The proposed method separates the relative contributions of white noise, fluctuating features, and stationary features. The method is demonstrated on mammary epithelial cell spheroids in three-dimensional culture for capturing intracellular motility without loss of signal integrity.

Results show that the spatial patterns of motility are preserved and that hypothesis tests of spheroids treated with blebbistatin, a motor protein inhibitor, are unchanged with up to eightfold compression.

The ability to measure short- and long-term correlations compressively will enable new applications in (3+1)D imaging and high-throughput screening.