Application of Independent Component Analysis Techniques in Speckle Noise Reduction of Retinal OCT Images

摘要

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is an emerging technique in the field ofbiomedical imaging, with applications in ophthalmology, dermatology, coronaryimaging etc. OCT images usually suffer from a granular pattern, called specklenoise, which restricts the process of interpretation. Therefore the need forspeckle noise reduction techniques is of high importance. To the best of ourknowledge, use of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) techniques has neverbeen explored for speckle reduction of OCT images. Here, a comparative study ofseveral ICA techniques (InfoMax, JADE, FastICA and SOBI) is provided for noisereduction of retinal OCT images. Having multiple B-scans of the same location,the eye movements are compensated using a rigid registration technique. Then,different ICA techniques are applied to the aggregated set of B-scans forextracting the noise-free image. Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR),Contrast-to-Noise-Ratio (CNR) and Equivalent-Number-of-Looks (ENL), as well asanalysis on the computational complexity of the methods, are considered asmetrics for comparison. The results show that use of ICA can be beneficial,especially in case of having fewer number of B-scans.