Extracting information from optical coherence tomography images of tissues: signal attenuation and fractal analysis of speckle pattern

Two methods for analyzing OCT images of arterial tissues are tested. These methods are applied toward two types of samples: segments of arteries collected from atherosclerosis-prone Watanabe heritable hyper-lipidemic rabbits and pieces of porcine left descending coronary arteries without atherosclerosis. The first method is based on finding the attenuation coefficients for the OCT signal that propagates through various regions of the tissue. The second method involves calculating the fractal dimensions of the OCT signal textures in the regions of interest identified within the acquired images. A box-counting algorithm is used for calculating the fractal dimensions. Both parameters, the attenuation coefficient as well as the fractal dimension correlate very well with the anatomical features of both types of samples.

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