title: Three-dimensional speckle suppression in Optical Coherence Tomography based on the curvelet transform.
abstract: Optical coherence tomography is an emerging non-invasive technology that provides high resolution, cross-sectional tomographic images of internal structures of specimens. OCT images, however, are usually degraded by significant speckle noise. Here we introduce to our knowledge the first 3D approach to attenuating speckle noise in OCT images. Unlike 2D approaches which only consider information in individual images, 3D processing, by analyzing all images in a volume simultaneously, has the advantage of also taking the information between images into account. This, coupled with the curvelet transform's nearly optimal sparse representation of curved edges that are common in OCT images, provides a simple yet powerful platform for speckle attenuation. We show the approach suppresses a significant amount of speckle noise, while in the mean time preserves and thus reveals many subtle features that could get attenuated in other approaches.
authors.affiliation: Beckman Laser Institute, University of California, Irvine, California 92612, USA. zjian@uci.edu
authors.forename: Zhongping
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Jian
authors.forename: Lingfeng
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rao
authors.forename: Bruce J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Tromberg
authors.forename: Zhongping
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D016477:Artifacts; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D041623:Tomography, Optical Coherence / Q000379:methods*