Compressed intracellular motility via non-uniform temporal sampling in dynamic optical coherence tomography.

Significance: Optical coherence tomography has great utility for capturing dynamic processes, but such applications are particularly data-intensive. Samples such as biological tissues exhibit temporal features at varying time scales, which makes data reduction challenging.

Aim: We propose a method for capturing short- and long-term correlations of a sample in a compressed way using non-uniform temporal sampling to reduce scan time and memory overhead.

Approach: The proposed method separates the relative contributions of white noise, fluctuating features, and stationary features. The method is demonstrated on mammary epithelial cell spheroids in three-dimensional culture for capturing intracellular motility without loss of signal integrity.

Results: Results show that the spatial patterns of motility are preserved and that hypothesis tests of spheroids treated with blebbistatin, a motor protein inhibitor, are unchanged with up to eightfold compression.

Conclusions: The ability to measure short- and long-term correlations compressively will enable new applications in (3+1)D imaging and high-throughput screening.