Reconstruction of Optical Coherence Tomography Images from Wavelength Space Using Deep Learning

Conventional Fourier domain Optical Coherence Tomography (FD-OCT) systems depend on resampling into a wavenumber (<i>k</i>) domain to extract the depth profile. This either necessitates additional hardware resources or amplifies the existing computational complexity. Moreover, the OCT images also suffer from speckle noise, due to systemic reliance on low-coherence interferometry. We propose a streamlined and computationally efficient approach based on Deep Learning (DL) which enables reconstructing speckle-reduced OCT images directly from the wavelength (λ) domain. For reconstruction, two encoder-decoder styled networks, namely Spatial Domain Convolution Neural Network (SD-CNN) and Fourier Domain CNN (FD-CNN), are used sequentially. The SD-CNN exploits the highly degraded images obtained by Fourier transforming the (λ) domain fringes to reconstruct the deteriorated morphological structures along with suppression of unwanted noise. The FD-CNN leverages this output to enhance the image quality further by optimization in the Fourier domain (FD). We quantitatively and visually demonstrate the efficacy of the method in obtaining high-quality OCT images. Furthermore, we illustrate the computational complexity reduction by harnessing the power of DL models. We believe that this work lays the framework for further innovations in the realm of OCT image reconstruction.