Monte Carlo-based full-wavelength simulator of Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography
Introduction
Monte Carlo (MC) simulation has been widely used to study imaging procedures including Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT). Despite of the broadband nature of FD-OCT, the results obtained at single wavelength are often used in previous studies. Some wavelength-relied imaging applications, such as spectroscopic OCT (S-OCT), are unlikely to be simulated in this way due to the lack of information from the entire spectrum. Here, we propose a novel simulator for full-wavelength MC simulation of FD-OCT. All wavelengths within the emission spectrum of the light source will be simulated and the optical properties derived from Mie theory are applied. We further combine the inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) with a probability distribution-based signal pre-processing to combat the excessive noises in the OCT signal reconstruction, which is caused by the non-uniform distribution of the scattering events at different wavelengths. Proof-of-concept simulations are conducted to show the excellent performance of the proposed simulator on signal reconstruction and optical properties extraction. Compared with the conventional method, the proposed simulator is more accurate and could better preserve the wavelength-dependent features. For example, the mean square error (MSE) computed between the backscattering coefficient extracted by the proposed simulator and the ground truth is 0.11, which is far less than the value (7.67) of the conventional method. We believe this simulator could be an effective tool to study the wavelength-dependency in FD-OCT imaging as well as a preferred solution for simulating spectroscopic OCT.
Simulation configurations
Results
Full-wavelength signal reconstruction
Optical properties extraction and spectroscopic OCT
For more results, please refer to our [paper](https://opg.optica.org/boe/fulltext.cfm?uri=boe-13-12-6317&id=518908).
Acknowledgements
The project is built on the basic codes from OMLC (https://omlc.org/) and MatScat (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/36831-matscat).
Contact
If you have any questions, please contact jianing.mao@sjtu.edu.cn.