Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been shown to provide detailed images of the morphology and vibratory response in the living cochlea. As a part of the cochlea, the organ of Corti (OC) has a complex tissue structure including three rows of outer hair cells which act to amplify sound, supporting cells and one row of inner hair cells which transduce sound-induced vibrations into electrical signals. Unfortunately, OCT images of the OC have relatively low contrast, in spite of the fact that the microstructures have very different function and morphology. That fact has led us to explore alternative approaches to extracting contrast from these OCT images. In this paper, we propose a contrast-enhanced method based on spatial frequency to identify structures within the cochlea, including the OC. In total, 15 mice have been imaged with our customed OCT system and analyzed. A two-dimension spatial frequency analysis was performed over subregions of the images, using a sliding window. Then the power spectral density was fit to a 2-D Gaussian. Finally, we extracted several Gaussian fitting coefficients and constructed a coefficients map to enhance the visualization of the cochlea and identify structures within the OC. This method improves our ability to identify specific microstructures within the cochlea and ultimately map the functional vibratory response to these microstructures. Application of this approach can elucidate the micromechanical function of the cochlea.
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