Cancellation of coherent artifacts in OCT imaging

Coherent sidelobes of a source can severely degrade OCT image quality by introducing false targets if no targets are present at the sidelobe locations. Sidelobes can also add constructively or destructively to the targets that are present at the sidelobe locations. This constructive or destructive interference will result in cancellation of the true targets or display of incorrect echo amplitudes of the targets. We introduce the use of CLEAN, a nonlinear deconvolution algorithm, to cancel coherent sidelobes in OCT images of extracted human teeth. The results show that CLEAN can reduce the coherent artifacts to the noise background, sharpen the air-enamel and enamel-dentin interfaces and improve the image contrast.