Abstract

We describe a modification of a recently proposed unconventional OCT approach to 3D microvasculature imaging based on high-pass filtering of B-scans in the lateral direction. The B-scans are acquired in M-mode-like regime with highly overlapped A-scans. The goal of the described modification is to suppress non-fluid artifacts in the resultant microcirculation images. The modification is based on the amplitude normalization procedure of complex-valued OCT signal before subsequent processing. This allows one to efficiently suppress imaging degradation due to the influence of very bright spots/lines (e.g. from hairs on the surface) and retain images of real flows inside the tissue without any artificial cut-off of the surface signal, or application of pixel-intensity thresholds, or signal classification approaches.

© 2015 SPIE