General model for depth-resolved estimation of the optical attenuation coefficients in optical coherence tomography

Abstract

We present the proof of concept of a general model that uses the tissue sample transmittance as input to estimate the depth-resolved attenuation coefficient of tissue samples using optical coherence tomography (OCT). This method allows us to obtain an image of tissue optical properties instead of intensity contrast, guiding diagnosis and tissues differentiation, extending its application from thick to thin samples. The performance of our method was simulated and tested with the assistance of a home built single-layered and multilayered phantoms (~100 μm each layer) with known attenuation coefficient on the range of 0.9 to 2.32 mm−1. It is shown that the estimated depth-resolved attenuation coefficient recovers the reference values, measured by using an integrating sphere followed by the inverse adding doubling processing technique. That was corroborated for all situations when the correct transmittance value is used with an average difference of 7%. Finally, we applied the proposed method to estimate the depth-resolved attenuation coefficient for a thin biological sample, demonstrating the ability of our method on real OCT images.