Target imaging in scattering media using ghost imaging optical coherence tomography

Abstract

When the conventional optical coherence tomography (OCT) measures the transmittance and the absorbance of the target in the scattering media, its image is affected by the scattering media and gets a modulated target profile. Due to the influence of scattering and absorption by the media, the conventional OCT cannot eliminate this modulation. By using our proposed idea, ghost imaging-OCT (GI-OCT), to apply the GI technique to the measurement path of OCT, we can reconstruct the target profile in the scattering media without modulation. In this work, we introduce and demonstrate the concept and the experimental method of GI-OCT. This application can correct the influence of the scattering media for the target optical profile due to the advantage of the GI technique, which suppresses noise, here, modulated by scattering. Comparing the experimental results of the corrected target image with the original target image, we obtain the same distributions in the binarized images, and the error of the character size in the binarized deconvoluted image is less than the resolution of the image (0.04 mm), proving that the method successfully reconstructs the image without the scattering media influence.