ICHF HR

Computational aberration correction in spatiotemporal optical coherence (STOC) imaging

Optics Letters  2020 | Vol. 45, Issue 6 | 1293-1296 

Dawid Borycki, Egidijus Auksorius, Piotr Wegrzyn, and Maciej Wojtkowski

Abstract:

Spatiotemporal optical coherence (STOC) imaging is a new technique for suppressing coherent cross talk noise in Fourier-domain full-field optical coherence tomography (FD-FF-OCT). In STOC imaging, the time-varying inhomogeneous phase masks modulate the incident light to alter the interferometric signal. Resulting interference images are then processed as in standard FD-FF-OCT and averaged incoherently or coherently to produce cross-talk-free volumetric optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of the sample. Here, we show that coherent averaging is suitable when phase modulation is performed for both interferometer arms simultaneously. We explain the advantages of coherent over incoherent averaging. Specifically, we show that modulated signal, after coherent averaging, preserves lateral phase stability, enabling computational phase correction to compensate for geometrical aberrations. Ultimately, we employ it to correct for aberrations present in the image of the photoreceptor layer of the human retina that reveals otherwise invisible photoreceptor mosaics.

Full article

This project has received funding from the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
under grant agreement No 666295.