Laguerre Gauss modes for speckle reduction while extending depth of docus of optical coherence tomography (Conference Presentation)

In this work we develop a theoretical framework for analyzing generic speckle reduction algorithms including all possible light modulations: angular compounding, spatial light modulators and others. We show that speckle reduction using Laguerre Gauss modes - LG Speckle Reduction achieves the theoretical boundary of speckle reduction using minimal number of samples and therefore is optimal. We demonstrate LG Speckle reduction in in-vitro sample and show that speckle reduction is in line with our theoretical model. We further develop LG Speckle Reduction to show that it can outperform speckle reduction outside of the focal plane by most speckle reduction methods and generates fast and high-quality images.