Biomedical Image Signal Processing for Reflection-Based Imaging

Optical coherence tomography (OCT), ultrasound and other reflection based biomedical imaging technologies involve image signal processing that is primarily a filtering, digitizing and summing process so that the tissue cross-section can be visualized. In particular, in OCT, a series of adjacent one dimensional in-vivo axial interferograms (A-scan) are summed to form a two dimensional (B-scan) reflection map or reflectogram. Further graphical combinations can add adjacent B-scan together to form three dimensional C-scans. A physician can make a subjective interpretation and evaluation from the B and/or C-scans that may lead to actions impacting on the patient's prognosis. More objective information can be obtained by using backwards fitting models (BFM) that fit tissue characteristics, including layer depth and reflectivity, to imaged tissue A-scans, returning values that are not significantly different to the actual values.