Spatial resolution and noise in organic light-emitting diode displays for medical imaging applications

We report on the resolution and noise characteristics of handheld and workstation organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays in comparison with liquid crystal displays (LCDs). The results demonstrate advantages, in terms of sharpness, of handheld OLED displays with modulation transfer function (MTF) values exceeding 0.60 at the Nyquist frequencies. The OLED workstation included in this study exhibits significant signal contamination among adjacent pixels resulting in degraded resolution performance indicated by horizontal and vertical MTF values of 0.13 and 0.24 at the Nyquist frequency. On the other hand, its noise characteristics are superior to the LCD workstation tested. While the noise power spectral (NPS) values of the OLED workstation are 8.0x10(-6) mm(2) at 1 mm(-1), the LCD workstation has NPS values of 2.6x10(-5) mm(2). Although phone-size OLED displays have superior resolution and noise per pixel, the perceived resolution characteristics at appropriate viewing distances are inferior to tablet-size and workstation LCDs. In addition, our results show some degree of dependency of the resolution and noise on luminance level and viewing orientation. We also found a slightly degraded resolution and increased low-frequency noise at off-normal orientations in the handheld displays. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America