Speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography images using tissue viscoelasticity

摘要

We present a technique to reduce speckle in opticalncoherence tomography images of soft tissues. An averagenis formed over a set of B-scans that have been decorrelatednby viscoelastic creep strain. The necessary correction for thendeformation-induced spatial distortions between B-scans isnachieved through geometrical co-registration using an affinentransformation. Speckle reduction by up to a factor of 1.65nis shown in images of tissue-mimicking soft fibrin phantomsnand excised human lymph node tissue with no observablenloss of spatial resolution.