Spatially deconvolved optical coherence tomography.

In this paper we present spatially mapped point-spread function (PSF) measurements of an optical coherence tomography (OCT) instrument and subsequent spatial deconvolution. The OCT B-scan image plane was divided into 2400 subimages, for which PSFs were determined from OCT measurements of a specially designed phantom. Each PSF was deconvolved from its corresponding subimage of the phantom using the Lucy-Richardson algorithm. Following deconvolution, all of the subimages were reassembled to form a final deconvolved image, from which the resolution improvement was quantitatively assessed. The lateral resolution was found to improve by 3.1 microm compared to an axial resolution enhancement of 4.5 microm. The spatial uniformity of both axial and lateral resolution was also observed to increase following deconvolution, demonstrating the advantage of deconvolving local PSFs from their associated subimages.