Automatic and robust segmentation of endoscopic OCT images and optical staining.

We report a generic method for automatic segmentation of endoscopic optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. In this method, OCT images are first processed with L1 -L0 norm minimization based de-noising and smoothing algorithms to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and enhance the contrast between adjacent layers. The smoothed images are then formulated into cost graphs based on their vertical gradients. After that, tissue-layer segmentation is performed with the shortest path search algorithm. The efficacy and capability of this method are demonstrated by automatically and robustly identifying all five interested layers of guinea pig esophagus from in vivo endoscopic OCT images. Furthermore, thanks to the ultrahigh resolution, high SNR of endoscopic OCT images and the high segmentation accuracy, this method permits in vivo optical staining histology and facilitates quantitative analysis of tissue geometric properties, which can be very useful for studying tissue pathologies and potentially aiding clinical diagnosis in real time.