Respiratory gating of anatomical optical coherence tomography images of the human airway.

Anatomical optical coherence tomography (aOCT) is a long-range endoscopic imaging modality capable of quantifying size and shape of the human airway. A challenge to its in vivo application is motion artifact due to respiratory-related movement of the airway walls. This paper represents the first demonstration of respiratory gating of aOCT airway data, and introduces a novel error measure to guide appropriate parameter selection. Results indicate that at least four gates per respiratory cycle should be used, with only minor improvements as the number of gates is further increased. It is shown that respiratory gating can substantially improve the quality of aOCT images and reveal events and features that are otherwise obscured by blurring.