Temporal Non-Uniform Compressive Sampling for Dynamic Optical Coherence Tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) 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. Here we propose a method for capturing short- and long-time correlations of a sample using temporally compressive sampling to reduce scan time and memory overhead. The proposed method involves non-uniform sampling in time to separate the relative contributions of white noise, fluctuating features, and stationary features. This approach is demonstrated on mammary epithelial cell spheroids in 3D culture for capturing intracellular motility without loss of signal integrity. 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 8-fold compression. In broader contexts, the ability to measure short- and long-time correlations compressively will enable new applications in (3+1)D imaging and high-throughput screening.