Analysis of interferograms of multi-layered biological samples obtained from full field optical coherence tomography systems

Several methods were developed in the past to analyze interferograms produced by optical coherence tomography, and successfully applied to simulated or animated samples. However, these techniques do not cope with noisy and distorted interferograms from biological tissues. In this paper, known techniques, including the fast Fourier transform and several variations of the continuous wavelet transform, were employed to analyze the interferogram data. However, to cope with the difficulties in biological data, pre- and post-processing procedures and adaptive thresholding were developed to provide stability and robustness. Additionally, three-dimensional structural models of the biological samples were constructed, and revealed information like the number and locations of interfaces, the layer thickness and pattern, and abnormalities.