Signal-carrying speckle in Optical Coherence Tomography: a methodological review on biomedical applications

TL;DR

This review explores how speckle patterns in OCT, traditionally seen as noise, can provide valuable tissue information, highlighting methods, applications, and the early stage of clinical validation.

Contribution

It systematically reviews methods for extracting speckle information in biomedical OCT, emphasizing its potential and current limitations in clinical applications.

Findings

Speckle features can aid in tissue classification and segmentation.

Speckle analysis is highly dependent on specific applications.

Most studies are theoretical or use phantoms, indicating early-stage research.

Abstract

Significance: Speckle has historically been considered a source of noise in coherent light imaging. However, a number of works in optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging have shown that speckle patterns may contain relevant information regarding sub-resolution and structural properties of the tissues from which it is originated. Aim: The objective of this work is to provide a comprehensive overview of the methods developed for retrieving speckle information in biomedical OCT applications. Approach: PubMed and Scopus databases were used to perform a systematic review on studies published until April 2021. From 134-screened studies, 37 were eligible for this review. Results: The studies have been clustered according to the nature of their analysis, namely static or dynamic, and all features were described and analysed. The results show that features retrieved from speckle can be used successfully in different applications, such as classification and segmentation. However, the results also show that speckle analysis is highly application-dependant, and the best approach varies between applications. Conclusions: Several of the reviewed analysis were only performed in a theoretical context or using phantoms, showing that signal-carrying speckle analysis in OCT imaging is still in its early stage, and further work is needed to validate its applicability and reproducibility in a clinical context.