Sample tilting for speckle suppression through angular compounding

Speckle degrades the quality of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images and impedes their visual interpretation. Current hardware methods for speckle suppression necessitate difficult hardware modifications. As a result, algorithmic approaches for speckle suppression generally lack validation or training with physically meaningful ground truth. Here, we demonstrate angular compounding through tilting of the sample with a motorized rotation stage. Tomograms acquired at different tilt angles are related to each other through a physics-informed affine map, which can be retrieved directly from the measurement data. Using a mechanical sample tilting stage obviates the need to alter the OCT hardware and enables effective angular compounding with existing OCT instruments.