UC Riverside

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a novel and promising imaging technique that has been widely applied in clinical practice and research. Currently advanced spectral-domain OCT is capable for fast generating three dimensional (3D) volumetric image and extracting multi-biological information that has potential uses in disease study. Based on a laboratory-built multi-functional spectral-domain OCT system with center wavelength of 1310 nm, the research goal in this thesis is to solve problems about proper optical characterization method of volumes of in vivo biological sample taken at different time points which requires appropriate 3D volume registration and alignment. In this thesis, system optimization is introduced in order to improve OCT signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and image quality for better image registration performance. Details of a computational-efficient 3D volume alignment based on cross-correlation image registration is discussed. Optical characterization of post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE) is described as an example to demonstrate the feasibility of the OCT system and to evaluate the image post-processing method in actual neural disease research.