Correcting for Spatial-Spectral Crosstalk and Chromatic Aberrations in Broadband Line-Scan Spectral-Domain OCT images

Digital correction of optical aberrations allows for high-resolution imaging across the full depth range in optical coherence tomography (OCT). Many digital aberration correction (DAC) methods have been proposed in the past to evaluate and correct monochromatic wavefront phase errors in OCT images. However, other factors that deteriorate the image quality have not been fully investigated. Here we present a novel approach to digital recovery of the spatial resolution in images acquired with a broadband Line-Scan Spectral-Domain OCT system (LS-SD-OCT), which addresses 2main factors that limit the effectiveness of DAC for restoring diffraction-limited resolution in LS-SD-OCT images: spatial-spectral crosstalk and chromatic aberrations. In the proposed approach, spatial-spectral crosstalk and chromatic aberrations were effectively suppressed by registration of monochromatic sub-band tomograms that were digitally corrected for aberrations. The new method was validated by imaging a standard resolution target, a microspheres phantom, and different biological tissues. LS SD-OCT technology combined with the proposed novel image reconstruction method could be a valuable research tool for various biomedical and clinical applications.