A pseudo-spectrum reconstruction method for reducing saturation artifact in spectral-domain optical coherence tomography

Saturation artifact is a significant image noise due to the limited detectable maximum light intensity of the CCD camera in the spectrometer module of spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). This effect makes the OCT image appear with saturation noise in certain areas along with even more obvious vertical lines of noise. The unwanted artifacts cover the real sample structure information and can render the image unclear. This artifact problem is significant when using highly focused objective lenses for improving image transverse resolution. In this study, we developed a parabolic-based reconstruction method to estimate the saturated parts of the measured spectra in order to obtain the corresponding pseudo spectra. The saturation artifact is clearly reduced when the OCT images are processed from the pseudo spectra.