Abstract

In recent pre-clinical studies, we have demonstrated that analysis of speckle statistics in low-scattering, low SNR regions may have applications for accurate lymphatic vessels (and nerves) mapping in optical coherence tomography (OCT) of biotissues. Specifically, we utilized a Rayleigh fitting goodness-of-fit threshold parameter to isolate low scattering biological structures, in particular to distinguish them from noise. The threshold as well as the size of region of interest (ROI) for such speckle statistics evaluation were both chosen empirically. Here we present a model simulation study aimed at optimizing and automatically determining these empirically chosen important parameters. We explore the Rayleigh fit and speckle contrast metrics parameter space to enable accurate label-free OCT mapping of weakly scattering structures such as lymphatic vessels.

© 2019 SPIE/OSA