Adaptive Scanning for Framerate or Resolution Improvement with Point- and Line-Scan Imaging Modalities

Unmet Need

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a noninvasive imaging technology used to obtain high resolution cross-sectional images of biologic tissues, especially the retina. OCT testing has become a standard of care for the assessment and treatment of most retinal conditions. Due to slow acquisitions at useful resolutions, OCT suffers from low frame rates and significant motion artifact when the scan target is moving. In addition, for scenes with dynamic features on static backgrounds, OCT is inefficient in its repeated scanning of unchanged regions.

Technology

A new Duke technology implements real-time adaptive scanning using a probabilistic approach to balance the re-imaging of known dynamic positions with exploration to identify undiscovered dynamic positions. This algorithm requires no knowledge of the underlying scene structure, seamlessly reduces to uniform scanning, and generates feasible time-optimal scanner trajectories on the fly. Using this software-only approach with a 200 kHz swept-source OCT system, the inventor demonstrated a 5x speedup in volumetric framerate without significantly compromising image quality for appropriate scenes.