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Technologies for Medical Sciences pp 141–157Cite as

OCT Noise Despeckling Using 3D Nonlinear Complex Diffusion Filter

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computational Vision and Biomechanics ((LNCVB,volume 1))

Abstract

An improved despeckling method, based on complex diffusion filtering, is herein presented to enhance structure segmentation in high-definition spectral domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) data. We propose to extend the traditional nonlinear complex diffusion filter concept propose by Gilboa IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 26:1020–1036, 2004) from 2- to 3-dimensions, taking into account the consistency of noise along the entire 3D data volume. Moreover we also propose the extension to 3D of an improved complex diffusion filter (Bernardes et al. Opt Express 18:24,048–24,059, 2010), that was specially built for retinal tissue signal preservation in OCT data and that takes into account an adaptive optimized time step for the finite difference discretization. The extension to 3D of the traditional method compares favorably to existing methods reducing speckle noise and preserving edges and features. As expected, the improved 3D version has better performance than the traditional one. Numerical simulations show the feasibility of the method.

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Acknowledgements

This study is supported in part by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under the research project PTDC/SAU-BEB/103151/2008 and program COMPETE (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-010930). The authors would like to thanks Dr. Melissa Horne and Carl Zeiss Meditec (Dublic, CA, USA) for their support on getting access to OCT data and AIBILI Clinical Trial Center technicians for their support in managing data, working with patients and performing scans. This study is registered at ClinicalTrials.org (ID: NCT00797524).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Association for Innovation and Biomedical Research on Light and Image (AIBILI), Coimbra, Portugal

    C. Maduro, T. Santos, P. Rodrigues, J. Cunha-Vaz & R. Bernardes

  2. Institute of Biomedical Research on Light and Image (IBILI), Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    P. Serranho & R. Bernardes

Authors
  1. C. Maduro
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  2. P. Serranho
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  3. T. Santos
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  4. P. Rodrigues
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  5. J. Cunha-Vaz
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  6. R. Bernardes
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to C. Maduro .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Porto, 4200-465, Portugal

    Renato M. Natal Jorge

  2. Fac. Engenharia, Lab. Engenharia de Processos,, Universidade do Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, Porto, 4200-465, Portugal

    João Manuel R. S. Tavares

  3. UFMG, Laboratorio de Bioengenharia, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Av. Antonio Carlos 6627, Belo Horizonte, 31270-901, Minas Gerais, Brazil

    Marcos Pinotti Barbosa

  4. University of Dundee, College of Art, Science and Engineering, Medical Engineering Research Institute, Dundee, DD1 4 HN, United Kingdom

    A.P. Slade

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Maduro, C., Serranho, P., Santos, T., Rodrigues, P., Cunha-Vaz, J., Bernardes, R. (2012). OCT Noise Despeckling Using 3D Nonlinear Complex Diffusion Filter. In: Natal Jorge, R., Tavares, J., Pinotti Barbosa, M., Slade, A. (eds) Technologies for Medical Sciences. Lecture Notes in Computational Vision and Biomechanics, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4068-6_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4068-6_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-007-4067-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-007-4068-6

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