Reconstruction of structural images of endoscopic optical coherence tomography by taking into account speckle patterns

Abstract

Reconstruction of structural images of endoscopic optical coherence tomography by taking into account speckle patterns

Frolov S.V., Potlov A.Yu., Frolova T.A.

Incoming article date: 19.10.2020

In the presented work, a method of reconstruction of structural images in endoscopic optical coherence tomography based on taking into account speckle patterns by using the operations of morphological erosion and expansion is considered. The proposed algorithm for reducing the level of speckle noise to improve the quality of visualization in endoscopic optical coherence tomography was practically implemented in the LabVIEW environment. Distinctive features of the proposed algorithm are morphological processing of B-scans, filtering by convolution before morphological processing of B-scans, and multilevel filtering of A-scans and B-scans consisting of them. A series of computer experiments showed a stable increase in the signal-to-noise ratio and contrast of the obtained structural images when using the developed algorithm. The proposed algorithm for reducing the level of speckle noise in structural images can be used in medical technologies to visualize the internal structure of cavities and body tracts.

Keywords: speckle noise, optical coherence tomography, endoscopic systems, structural image, morphological erosion, morphological dilation, speckle reduction, coherence probing depth