OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY AND COHERENCE DOMAIN OPTICAL METHODS IN BIOMEDICINE XVII

Correlation mapping optical coherence tomography (cmOCT) is an alternative robust method for obtaining volumetric images of dynamic perfusion within the microcirculatory tissue beds in vivo. The cmOCT method uses a 2D correlation mapping algorithm on the intensity OCT images to extract depth resolved flow map from static tissue background. The earlier reported cmOCT was based on a commercial swept-source OCT system, which uses a scanning protocol with dense sampling between adjacent B-frame, such that the inter frame separation was within the resolution limit of the OCT system to ensure strong correlation between adjacent frames. However, this scanning protocol requires a relatively long scan time and high density B-frame images to reconstruct the volumetric perfusion map, which degraded the system performance for fast wide-field in vivo imaging applications. In order to overcome this limitation we implemented a custom built high-speed spectral domain OCT and introduced a new scanning protocol for high-speed and high sensitive imaging of cmOCT. The new scan protocol measures repeated B-scans at the same location to generate a high sensitivity correlation map between successive B-frames. This scanning protocol can provide fast wide scanning with relatively short scanning time.