One-Step Enhancer: Deblurring and Denoising of OCT Images

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a rapidly evolving imaging technology that combines a broadband and low-coherence light source with interferometry and signal processing to produce high-resolution images of living tissues. However, the speckle noise introduced by the low-coherence interferometry and the blur from device motions significantly degrade the quality of OCT images. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a potential solution to deal with these issues and enhance OCT image quality. However, training such networks based on traditional supervised learning methods is impractical due to the lack of clean ground truth images. Consequently, this research proposes an unsupervised learning method for OCT image enhancement, termed one-step enhancer (OSE). Specifically, OSE performs denoising and deblurring based on a single step process. A generative adversarial network (GAN) is used for this. Encoders disentangle the raw images into a content domain, blur domain and noise domain to extract features. Then, the generator can generate clean images from the extracted features. To regularize the distribution range of retrieved blur characteristics, KL divergence loss is employed. Meanwhile, noise patches are enforced to promote more accurate disentanglement. These strategies considerably increase the effectiveness of GAN training for OCT image enhancement when used jointly. Both quantitative and qualitative visual findings demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for OCT image denoising and deblurring. These results are significant not only to provide an enhanced visual experience for clinicians but also to supply good quality data for OCT-guide operations. The enhanced images are needed, e.g., for the development of robust, reliable and accurate autonomous OCT-guided surgical robotic systems.