Compressive-sensing swept-source optical coherence tomography angiography with reduced noise

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), as a functional extension of optical coherence tomography (OCT), has exhibited a great potential to aid in clinical diagnostics. Currently, OCTA still suffers from motion artifact and noise. Therefore, in this article, we propose to implement compressive sensing (CS) on B-scans to reduce motion artifact by increasing B-scan rate. Meanwhile, a noise reduction filter is specially designed by combining CS, Gaussian filter and median filter. Specially, CS filtering is realized by averaging multiple CS repetitions on en-face OCTA images with varied sampling functions. The method is evaluated on in vivo OCTA images of human skin. The results show that vasculature structures can be reconstructed well through CS on B-scans with a sampling rate of 70%. Moreover, the noise can be significantly eliminated by the developed filter. This implies that our method has a good potential to expedite OCTA imaging and improve the image quality.