Background Noise Reduction of OCT Images Based on Region Filling

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is widely used in biomedical imaging. However, background noise severely affects the diagnosis and identification of diseased tissues. Here, we propose a background-noise reduction method based on region filling. OCT images of in vivo skin tissues, ex vivo brain tumors and ex vivo brain normal tissues had been analyzed to remove background noise using the method. Results demonstrated that the mean of the noise reduction ratio (NRR) reached more than 95% and the image-to-noise ratio (INR) ranges from −0.5 dB to 2.5 dB. The denoised OCT images demonstrated a better three-dimensional (3-D) visualization effect. The proposed method is useful for removing the background noise of OCT images in medical imaging.