Evaluation of the adaptive speckle suppression filter for coronary opticalcoherence tomography imaging

During the last few years, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has demonstra ted considerable promise as a method of high-resolution intravascular Imagi ng. The goal of this study was to apply and to test the applicability of th e rotating kernel transformation (RKT) technique to the speckle reduction a nd enhancement of OCT images. The technique is locally adaptive, It is base d on sequential application of directional masks and selection of the maxim um of all outputs. This method enhances the image features by emphasizing t hin edges while suppressing a noisy background. Qualitatively, the RKT algo rithm provides noticeable improvement over the original image. All processe d images are smoother and have better-defined borders of media, intima, and plaque, The quantitative evaluation of RKT performance showed that in term s of average contrast-to-noise ratio, there Is a significant improvement in image quality between original and enhanced images. The RKT image enhancem ent technique shows great promise in improving OCT images for superior boun dary Identification.