Aperture Phase Modulation with Adaptive Optics: A Novel Approach for Speckle Reduction and Structure Extraction in Optical Coherence Tomography

Speckle is an inevitable consequence of the use of coherent light in optical coherence tomography (OCT), and often acts as noise that obscures micro-structures of biological tissue. We here present a novel method of suppressing speckle noise intrinsically compatible with adaptive optics (AO) in OCT system: by modulating the phase inside the imaging system pupil aperture with a segmented deformable mirror, thus producing minor perturbations in the point spread function (PSF) to create un-correlated speckle pattern between B-scans, and further averaging to wash out the speckle but maintain the structures. It is a well-controlled and universal method which can efficiently determine the optimal range of phase modulation that minimizing speckle noise while maximizing image resolution and signal strength for different systems and/or samples. As an active method, its effectiveness and efficiency were demonstrated by both ex-vivo non-biological and in-vivo biological applications.

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