Improving resolution of optical coherence tomography for imaging of microstructures

Multi-frame superresolution technique has been used to improve the lateral resolution of spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) for imaging of 3D microstructures. By adjusting the voltages applied to.. and.. galvanometer scanners in the measurement arm, small lateral imaging positional shifts have been introduced among different C-scans. Utilizing the extracted x-y. plane en face image frames from these specially offset C-scan image sets at the same axial position, we have reconstructed the lateral high resolution image by the efficient multi-frame superresolution technique. To further improve the image quality, we applied the latest K-SVD and bilateral total variation denoising algorithms to the raw SD-OCT lateral images before and along with the superresolution processing, respectively. The performance of the SD-OCT of improved lateral resolution is demonstrated by 3D imaging a microstructure fabricated by photolithography and a double-layer microfluidic device.