Noise Reduction in Optical Coherence Tomography Volumes for Improved 3D Visualization

Abstract

In this paper we present a new volumetric method for noise reduction in Optical Coherence Tomography volumes which operates on sub-volumes to improve the quality of rendered 3D volumes. In order to remove noise uniformly, while preserving important details, the proposed algorithm simultaneously observes the estimated amount of noise and the sharpness measure, and iteratively enhances the volume until stopping criterion is met. We evaluate the proposed method in terms of different performance measures and visually, by observing visualizations of OCT volumes on an auto-stereoscopic 3D screen.