Denoising during Optical Coherence Tomography of the Prostate Nerves via Bivariate Shrinkage using Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform

摘要

The performance of wavelet shrinkage algorithms for image-denoising can be improved significantly by considering the statistical dependencies among wavelet coefficients as demonstrated by several algorithms presented in the literature. In this paper, a locally adaptive denoising algorithm using a bivariate shrinkage function is applied to reduce speckle noise in time-domain (TD) optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of the prostate. The algorithm is illustrated using the dual-tree complex wavelet transform. The cavernous nerve and prostate gland can be separated from discontinuities due to noise, and image quality metrics improvements with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) increase of 14 dB are attained with a sharpness reduction of only 3%.