Robust Ultrafast Projection Pipeline for Structural and Angiography Imaging of Fourier-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

The current methods to generate projections for structural and angiography imaging of Fourier-Domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) are significantly slow for prediagnosis improvement, prognosis, real-time surgery guidance, treatments, and lesion boundary definition. This study introduced a robust ultrafast projection pipeline (RUPP) and aimed to develop and evaluate the efficacy of RUPP. RUPP processes raw interference signals to generate structural projections without the need for Fourier Transform. Various angiography reconstruction algorithms were utilized for efficient projections. Traditional methods were compared to RUPP using PSNR, SSIM, and processing time as evaluation metrics. The study used 22 datasets (hand skin: 9; labial mucosa: 13) from 8 volunteers, acquired with a swept-source optical coherence tomography system. RUPP significantly outperformed traditional methods in processing time, requiring only 0.040 s for structural projections, which is 27 times faster than traditional summation projections. For angiography projections, the best RUPP variation took 0.15 s, making it 7518 times faster than the windowed eigen decomposition method. However, PSNR decreased by 41–45% and SSIM saw reductions of 25–74%. RUPP demonstrated remarkable speed improvements over traditional methods, indicating its potential for real-time structural and angiography projections in FD-OCT, thereby enhancing clinical prediagnosis, prognosis, surgery guidance, and treatment efficacy.