Improved speckle contrast optical coherence tomography angiography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is becoming a clinically useful and important imaging technique due to its ability to provide high-resolution structural imaging in vivo. Optical coherence tomography angiography(OCTA) can visualize vasculature imaging of biological tissues. With the advent of Fourier-domain OCT, numerous OCTA techniques have been developed to detect the microvasculature in vivo. The macular region of the fundus is separated into retinal and choroid regions by segmentation algorithm in the data processing, a false blood flow signal is generated due to bulk motion when vasculature imaging was segmented in the retinal regions. However, the most recent OCT angiographic approaches are sensitive to bulk motion noise. To overcome this limitation, we proposed an improved speckle contrast optical coherence tomography angiography (ISC-OCTA) algorithm to image vasculature network in vivo. The improved speckle contrast image was acquired by the improved speckle contrast algorithm for N consecutive frames of the same location, and the vasculature of the tissue was generated by masking the averaged image with the improved speckle contrast image. ISC-OCTA was tested on in vivo images of a phantom mouse ear and a human macula. Compared to the recently reported algorithms, we found that ISC-OCTA can distinguish the dynamic information of blood flow from static tissue and visualize capillary vessels. Especially when the segmentation data generates false information, the ISC-OCTA algorithm has a significant effect on the suppression of the line noise. ISC-OCTA can provide clear visualization of vessels as other algorithms and may be useful in the diagnosis of ophthalmic diseases.