3D motion-compensated optical coherence tomography based on higher-order regression towards real-time volumetric imaging of the cornea

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has evolved into a powerful imaging technique that allows high-resolution visualization of biological tissues. However, most in vivo OCT systems for real-time volumetric (3D) imaging suffer from image distortion due to motion artifacts induced by involuntary and physiological movements of the living tissue, such as the eye that is constantly in motion.While several methods have been proposed to account for and remove motion artifacts during OCT imaging of the retina, fewer works have focused on motion-compensated OCT-based measurements of the cornea. Here, we propose an OCT system for volumetric imaging of the cornea, capable of compensating both axial and lateral motion with micron-scale accuracy and millisecond-scale time consumption based on higher-order regression. System performance was evaluated during volumetric imaging of corneal phantom and bovine (ex vivo) samples that were positioned in the palm of a hand to simulate involuntary 3D motion. An overall motion-artifact error of less than 4.61 μm and processing time of about 3.40 ms for each B-scan was achieved.