Spectrally Extended Line Field Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography

TL;DR

The paper introduces SELF-OCTA, a novel optical coherence tomography angiography platform that significantly enhances field of view, enables quantitative flow measurement, and improves motion correction without hardware changes.

Contribution

SELF-OCTA provides a spectrally extended line field approach that overcomes speed and FOV limitations, allowing wider, quantitative, and motion-corrected angiography in existing OCT devices.

Findings

Doubles the field of view without signal loss

Enables quantitative flow imaging without extra B-scans

Facilitates motion tracking using line field overlap

Abstract

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) has been established as a powerful tool for investigating vascular diseases and is expected to become a standard of care technology. However, its widespread clinical usage is hindered by technical gaps such as limited field of view (FOV), lack of quantitative flow information, and suboptimal motion correction. Here we report a new imaging platform, termed spectrally extended line field (SELF) OCTA that provides advanced solutions to the above-mentioned challenges. SELF-OCTA breaks the speed limitations and achieves two-fold gain in FOV without sacrificing signal strength through parallel image acquisition. Towards quantitative angiography, the 'frequency flow' imaging mechanism overcomes the imaging speed bottleneck by obviating the requirement for superfluous B-scans. In addition, the 'frequency flow' imaging mechanism facilitates OCTA-data based motion tracking with overlap between adjacent line fields. Since it can be implemented in any existing OCT device without significant hardware modification or affecting existing functions, we expect that SELF-OCTA will make non-invasive, wide field, quantitative, and low-cost angiographic imaging available to larger patient populations.