Motion artifact and speckle noise reduction in polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography by retinal tracking

Abstract

We present a novel polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) system with an integrated retinal tracker. The tracking operates at up to 60 Hz, correcting PS-OCT scanning positions during the acquisition to avoid artifacts caused by eye motion. To demonstrate the practical performance of the system, we imaged several healthy volunteers and patients with AMD both with B-scan repetitions for frame averaging and with 3D raster scans. Under large retinal motions with up to 1 mm amplitude at 0.5 ~a few Hz frequency range, motion artifact suppression in the PS-OCT images as well as standard deviation noise reduction in the frame averaged retardation images are presented. References and links1. M. R. Hee, D. Huang, E. A. Swanson, and J. G. Fujimoto, "Polarization-Sensitive Low-Coherence Reflectometer for Birefringence Characterization and Ranging," J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 9(6), 903-908 (1992). 2. J. F. de Boer, T. E. Milner, M. J. C. van Gemert, and J. S. Nelson, "Two-dimensional birefringence imaging in biological tissue by polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography," Opt. Lett. 22(12), 934-936 (1997). 3. J. F. De Boer, S. M. Srinivas, A. Malekafzali, Z. P. Chen, and J. S. Nelson, "Imaging thermally damaged tissue by polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography," Opt. Express 3(6), 212-218 (1998). 4. J. F. de Boer, T. E. Milner, and J. S. Nelson, "Determination of the depth-resolved Stokes parameters of light backscattered from turbid media by use of polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography," Opt. Lett. 24(5), 300-302 (1999). 5. C. K. Hitzenberger, E. Goetzinger, M. Sticker, M. Pircher, and A. F. Fercher, "Measurement and imaging of birefringence and optic axis orientation by phase resolved polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography," Opt. Express 9(13), 780-790 (2001 Hitzenberger, "Value of polarisation-sensitive optical coherence tomography in diseases affecting the retinal pigment epithelium," Br. J. Ophthalmol. 92(2), 204-209 (2008). 18. C. Ahlers, E. Götzinger, M. Pircher, I. Golbaz, F. Prager, C. Schütze, B. Baumann, C. K. Hitzenberger, and U.Schmidt-Erfurth, "Imaging of the retinal pigment epithelium in age-related macular degeneration using polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography," Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 51(4), 2149-2157 (2010). 36. E. Götzinger, B. Baumann, M. Pircher, and C. K. Hitzenberger, "Polarization maintaining fiber based ultra-high resolution spectral domain polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography," Opt. Express 17(25), 22704-22717 (2009

Polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography – a review [Invited]

“…However, fibrotic tissue shows form birefringence and can therefore be identified by PS-OCT [123,124]. A recent study using a PS-OCT system with an integrated retinal tracker [125] -which is important since the fixation capability of affected patients is usually poor, leading to heavy motion artifacts -demonstrated that fibrotic lesions can be readily identified and in the majority of cases also segmented by their characteristic birefringence patterns, showing column-like axis orientation patterns in PS-OCT B-scans (cf. Figure 18) [126].…”

Involuntary eye motion correction in retinal optical coherence tomography: Hardware or software solution?

“…Sugita et al (2014) took advantage of line-scanning laser ophthalmoscope (LSLO) for eye motion artifact correction and speckle noise reduction of polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT). From its first demonstration for measurements in biological samples (Hee et al (1992)), PS-OCT has become one of the most important tools among the functional extensions of OCT that can assess more than the basic tomographic images of the reflected light intensity (Pircher et al (2006b), Yamanari et al (2008), Yasuno et al (2010)).…”

Polarization Sensitive Optical Coherence Tomography: A Review of Technology and Applications

“…The size of speckles can be kept small by using broadband light sources and optics providing high transverse resolution [46,118]. In image processing, speckle noise can be reduced by image averaging and dedicated algorithms [119,120]. PS-OCT also enables the segmentation of structures based on common polarization properties and the determination of interfaces between different tissue segments based on changing polarization properties.…”