OCT Noise Despeckling Using 3D Nonlinear Complex Diffusion Filter - Technologies for Medical Sciences - page 137

OCT Noise Despeckling Using 3D Nonlinear
Complex Diffusion Filter

C. Maduro, P. Serranho, T. Santos, P. Rodrigues, J. Cunha-Vaz,
and R. Bernardes

Abstract An improved despeckling method, based on complex diffusion filtering,
is herein presented to enhance structure segmentation in high-definition spectral
domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) data. We propose to extend the
traditional nonlinear complex diffusion filter concept propose by Gilboa (IEEE
Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 26:1020-1036, 2004) from 2- to 3-dimensions,
taking into account the consistency of noise along the entire 3D data volume.
Moreover we also propose the extension to 3D of an improved complex diffusion
filter (Bernardes et al. Opt Express 18:24,048-24,059, 2010), that was specially
built for retinal tissue signal preservation in OCT data and that takes into account an
adaptive optimized time step for the finite difference discretization. The extension
to 3D of the traditional method compares favorably to existing methods reducing
speckle noise and preserving edges and features. As expected, the improved 3D
version has better performance than the traditional one. Numerical simulations show
the feasibility of the method.

C. Maduro ( ) • T. Santos • P. Rodrigues • J. Cunha-Vaz
Association for Innovation and Biomedical Research on Light and Image (AIBILI),
Coimbra, Portugal
e-mail: [e-mail] ; [e-mail] ; [e-mail] ; [e-mail]
P. Serranho
Institute of Biomedical Research on Light and Image (IBILI), Faculty of Medicine,
University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
e-mail: [e-mail]
R. Bernardes
Association for Innovation and Biomedical Research on Light and Image (AIBILI),
Institute of Biomedical Research on Light and Image (IBILI), Faculty of Medicine,
University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
e-mail: [e-mail]