A Spatiotemporal Model for Precise and Efficient Fully-Automatic 3D Motion Correction in OCT

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a micrometer-scale, volumetric imaging modality that has become a clinical standard in ophthalmology. OCT instruments image by raster-scanning a focused light spot across the retina, acquiring sequential cross-sectional images to generate volumetric data. Patient eye motion during the acquisition poses unique challenges: Non-rigid, discontinuous distortions can occur, leading to gaps in data and distorted topographic measurements. We present a new distortion model and a corresponding fully-automatic, reference-free optimization strategy for computational motion correction in orthogonally raster-scanned, retinal OCT volumes. Using a novel, domain-specific spatiotemporal parametrization of forward-warping displacements, eye motion can be corrected continuously for the first time. Parameter estimation with temporal regularization improves robustness and accuracy over previous spatial approaches. We correct each A-scan individually in 3D in a single mapping, including repeated acquisitions used in OCT angiography protocols. Specialized 3D forward image warping reduces median runtime to < 9 s, fast enough for clinical use. We present a quantitative evaluation on 18 subjects with ocular pathology and demonstrate accurate correction during microsaccades. Transverse correction is limited only by ocular tremor, whereas submicron repeatability is achieved axially (0.51 μ m median of medians), representing a dramatic improvement over previous work. This allows assessing longitudinal changes in focal retinal pathologies as a marker of disease progression or treatment response, and promises to enable multiple new capabilities such as supersampled/super-resolution volume reconstruction and analysis of pathological eye motion occurring in neurological diseases.