Automatically Determining the Confocal Parameters From OCT B-Scans for Quantification of the Attenuation Coefficients

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Nicholas Dwork, Gennifer T. Smith, Theodore Leng, John M. Pauly, Audrey K. Bowden

Published: 2019, Last Modified: 06 Nov 2025IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging 2019EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: The attenuation coefficient is a relevant biomarker for many diagnostic medical applications. Recently, the Depth-Resolved Confocal (DRC) technique was developed to automatically estimate the attenuation coefficients from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) data with pixel-level resolution. However, DRC requires that the confocal function parameters (i.e., focal plane location and apparent Rayleigh range) be known a priori. In this paper, we present the autoConfocal algorithm: a simple, automatic method for estimating those parameters directly from OCT imagery when the focal plane is within the sample. We present autoConfocal+DRC results on phantom data, ex-vivo biological tissue data, and in-vivo clinical data.