Large-volume optical coherence tomography with real-time correction of geometric distortion artifacts

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time, GPU-accelerated method for correcting geometric distortion artifacts in large-volume optical coherence tomography, enabling high-resolution, wide-field imaging with accurate 3D shape measurements.

Contribution

The authors introduce a simple, real-time 3D recalibration algorithm for OCT distortion correction that outperforms previous ray-tracing methods in speed and practicality.

Findings

Achieved <15 micron geometric surface shape accuracy.

Maintained <10 micron optical resolution in large-volume OCT.

Enabled real-time distortion correction on standard graphics hardware.

Abstract

Large-volume optical coherence tomography (OCT)-setups employ scanning mirrors and suffer from non-linear geometric distortion artifacts in which the degree of distortion is determined by the maximum angles over which the mirrors rotate. In this chapter, we describe a straightforward approach to correct for these distortion artifacts, creating an alternative to previously reported ray-tracing schemes that are unable to apply these corrections in real-time. By implementing the proposed 3D recalibration algorithm on the graphics card of a standard computer, this feature can be applied in real-time. We validate the accuracy of the technique using OCT measurements of a highly curved object within a large imaging volume of 12.35 x 10.13 x 2.36 mm^3. The resulting 3D object shape measurements are compared against high-resolution and aberration-free optical profilometry measurements. Maintaining an optical resolution of <10 micron within the sample, both axially and transversally, we realized a real-time, high-resolution, large-volume OCT imaging system, capable of producing distortion corrected wide-field OCT data with a geometric surface shape accuracy of <15 micron.