Computationally efficient adaptive optimization of vector-method parameters for phase-sensitive strain estimation in optical coherence elastography

A new method for automatic adaptive optimization of strain estimation in phase-sensitive optical coherence tomography (OCT) is introduced. More specifically, this paper focuses on optimizing the estimation of strain using the vector method, in which OCT signals are treated as vectors in the complex plane. In phase-sensitive optical coherence elastography, the tissue strain is extracted from the interframe phase variation between the complex-valued scans acquired for the initial and deformed tissue. This phase variation is proportional to interframe displacements of scatterers and corresponds to the argument of the pixel-by-pixel product of the initial OCT scan and complex-conjugate deformed scan. Measurement noises and the so-called ‘speckle noise’ that are intrinsic to OCT scans cause degradation of the derived scan obtained by such multiplication. To mitigate the noise influence, complex-valued pixel amplitudes in the derived scan are usually averaged over a certain window. The interframe strain is found by estimating the gradient of the interframe phase difference. The noise influence on the strain estimation can also be reduced by increasing the scale over which the phase-variation gradient is estimated. However, choosing a too large window for preliminary averaging may significantly distort the reconstructed strain distribution. Similarly, a too large scale for gradient estimation may also cause errors in the estimated-strain magnitude and even its sign (because of possible phase wrapping). Therefore, appropriately performed adaptive choice of the strain-estimation parameters can greatly improve the quality of strain estimation. Here, we present a unified approach for adaptive choice of both the averaging-window size and gradient-estimation scale that were initially considered separately. The new method is computationally simplified but enables approximately the same strain-estimation quality, as demonstrated using both simulated and experimental OCT data.