TY - JOUR T1 - Aperture Phase Modulation with Adaptive Optics: A Novel Approach for Speckle Reduction and Structure Extraction in Optical Coherence Tomography JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/406108 SP - 406108 AU - Pengfei Zhang AU - Suman K. Manna AU - Eric B. Miller AU - Yifan Jian AU - Ratheesh Kumar Meleppat AU - Marinko V. Sarunic AU - Edward N. Pugh, Jr. AU - Robert J. Zawadzki Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/31/406108.abstract N2 - Speckle is an inevitable consequence of the use of coherent light in optical coherence tomography (OCT), and often acts as noise that obscures micro-structures of biological tissue. We here present a novel method of suppressing speckle noise intrinsically compatible with adaptive optics (AO) in OCT system: by modulating the phase inside the imaging system pupil aperture with a segmented deformable mirror, thus producing minor perturbations in the point spread function (PSF) to create un-correlated speckle pattern between B-scans, and further averaging to wash out the speckle but maintain the structures. It is a well-controlled and universal method which can efficiently determine the optimal range of phase modulation that minimizing speckle noise while maximizing image resolution and signal strength for different systems and/or samples. As an active method, its effectiveness and efficiency were demonstrated by both ex-vivo non-biological and in-vivo biological applications. ER -