Generalized representation of OCT signals and its applications to de-speckling and spatial-differential imaging

In this presentation, we demonstrate the generalized representation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) signal and its application to de-speckling and spatial-differential imaging. Here we introduce “shifted-complex-conjugate-product (SCCP)”, where the complex OCT signal and its complex conjugate are mutually shifted and defocused. Several types of OCT images can be derived from SCCP by taking real part, imaginary part, or phase of SCCP. The imaginary-part imaging enables volumetric differential contrast (VDC), and the real-part imaging enables OCT speckle modulation. The phase part provides the Doppler phase of phase-sensitive Doppler OCT. In addition, we also showed that the conventional OCT intensity image is a specialization of the real part imaging.