Compensation of refractive index variation in optical coherence tomography images

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging is a high resolution and non-invasive imaging modality that provides cross-sectional images of a tissue. The time of flight in the signal processing of the OCT system is calculated based on a constant refractive index. Different layers of the complex tissues however have different refractive indices. This issue prompts pixels in the image to be misplaced and that makes it difficult for the physicians to have an accurate diagnosis of abnormalities based on OCT imaging, e.g., in measurement of the thickness of skin layers. In this paper, we propose a novel post-processing method to correct for the refractive index. The proposed method is based on imaging a tissue to which a needle has been penetrated.