Limits of Fourier domain Doppler-OCT at high velocities

Spectrometer-based Fourier domain OCT is often used to measure blood flow velocities. Commonly, the axial component of the velocity is calculated from the phase difference of adjacent A-scans. While this result holds true for pure axial movement, a transversal component of the displacement will alter this simple relationship. We show theoretically and experimentally that because of the changing intensity of the illuminating beam on the moving particles the phase difference does not increase linearly with the velocity. Movements as small as 20% of the beam diameter during the integration time of the line detector will alter the observed phase shifts noticeably. For small angles between the transversal direction and the direction of movement the discrepancy between calculated and measured phase shift may be huge. High velocities at small angles will result in a limit for the phase shift smaller than π. A safe region, where the deviations to the linear relationship between axial velocity and phase shift are small, is specified.

[1]  M. Wojtkowski,et al.  Phase-resolved Doppler optical coherence tomography--limitations and improvements. , 2008, Optics letters.

[2]  J. Nelson,et al.  Characterization of fluid flow velocity by optical Doppler tomography. , 1995, Optics letters.

[3]  S H Yun,et al.  Motion artifacts in optical coherence tomography with frequency-domain ranging. , 2004, Optics express.

[4]  R. Leitgeb,et al.  Resonant Doppler flow imaging and optical vivisection of retinal blood vessels. , 2007, Optics express.

[5]  J. Izatt,et al.  In vivo bidirectional color Doppler flow imaging of picoliter blood volumes using optical coherence tomography. , 1997, Optics letters.

[6]  Jean-Pierre Monchalin,et al.  Gouy phase anomaly in optical coherence tomography , 2004 .

[7]  Zhiqiang Xu,et al.  A zero-crossing detection method applied to Doppler OCT. , 2008, Optics express.

[8]  Teresa C. Chen,et al.  In vivo dynamic human retinal blood flow imaging using ultra-high-speed spectral domain optical Doppler tomography , 2003 .

[9]  Carmen A. Puliafito,et al.  Automatic retinal blood flow calculation using spectral domain optical coherence tomography , 2007 .

[10]  J. Fujimoto,et al.  Optical Coherence Tomography , 1991 .

[11]  M. V. van Gemert,et al.  Noninvasive imaging of in vivo blood flow velocity using optical Doppler tomography. , 1997, Optics letters.

[12]  Joseph A Izatt,et al.  In vivo total retinal blood flow measurement by Fourier domain Doppler optical coherence tomography. , 2007, Journal of biomedical optics.

[13]  Changhuei Yang,et al.  Sensitivity advantage of swept source and Fourier domain optical coherence tomography. , 2003, Optics express.

[14]  M. Wojtkowski,et al.  Flow velocity estimation using joint Spectral and Time domain Optical Coherence Tomography. , 2008, Optics express.

[15]  Zhongping Chen,et al.  Optical Doppler tomographic imaging of fluid flow velocity in highly scattering media. , 1997, Optics letters.

[16]  S. Yun,et al.  Phase-resolved optical frequency domain imaging. , 2005, Optics express.

[17]  Julius Pekar,et al.  High speed, wide velocity dynamic range Doppler optical coherence tomography (Part I): System design, signal processing, and performance. , 2003, Optics express.

[18]  A. Fercher,et al.  Performance of fourier domain vs. time domain optical coherence tomography. , 2003, Optics express.

[19]  Edmund Koch,et al.  Effects of axial, transverse, and oblique sample motion in FD OCT in systems with global or rolling shutter line detector. , 2008, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision.

[20]  Zhongping Chen,et al.  Imaging and quantifying transverse flow velocity with the Doppler bandwidth in a phase-resolved functional optical coherence tomography. , 2002, Optics letters.