High-sensitive blood flow imaging of the retina and choroid by using double-beam optical coherence angiography

Wide-field and high-sensitive Doppler optical coherence angiography of the posterior human eye has been demonstrated. High-sensitive phase-resolved spectral-domain optical coherence tomography using the superluminescent diode with the central wavelength of 840 nm and bandwidth of 50 nm (FWHM) is developed. Two OCT signals with a time separation are acquired simultaneously with double sampling beams divided by using a Wollaston prism and a polarization-sensitive spectrometer consisting of two line scan cameras. The total power of two beams on the cornea is 700 μW. The line scan rate of cameras is 27 kHz and each OCT channel has the sensitivity of 93 dB. The two sampling beams are separated by approximately 162 um on the retina. The scanning of the beams is applied along the plane consisting of them. A single position on the sample is scanned twice with these two beams. High-contrast and high-sensitive phase-resolved blood flow image is obtained with these two OCT signals. Since the two signals are highly correlated, the decorrelation noise is small. In addition to that, this method does not require dense lateral sampling comparing to the lateral resolution which is demanded for previous phase-sensitive flow imaging. High-speed and high-sensitive blood flow imaging is enabled. The retinal and choroidal vasculature images with the area of 7.7 × 7.7 mm (512 × 256 axial scans) are obtained within 5 s.

[1]  J. Schuman,et al.  Optical coherence tomography. , 2000, Science.

[2]  J. Slakter,et al.  Adverse Reactions due to Indocyanine Green , 1994 .

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

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

[5]  S. Yun,et al.  High-speed optical frequency-domain imaging. , 2003, Optics express.

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

[7]  R S Sobel,et al.  Fluorescein angiography complication survey. , 1986, Ophthalmology.

[8]  Shuliang Jiao,et al.  Two-dimensional depth-resolved Mueller matrix of biological tissue measured with double-beam polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography. , 2002, Optics letters.

[9]  R. Zawadzki,et al.  Real-time assessment of retinal blood flow with ultrafast acquisition by color Doppler Fourier domain optical coherence tomography. , 2003, Optics express.

[10]  J. Izatt,et al.  Imaging and velocimetry of the human retinal circulation with color Doppler optical coherence tomography. , 2000, Optics letters.

[11]  Ruikang K. Wang,et al.  Three dimensional optical angiography. , 2007, Optics express.

[12]  Brett E. Bouma,et al.  Statistical Properties of Phase-Decorrelation in Phase-Resolved Doppler Optical Coherence Tomography , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[13]  Teresa C. Chen,et al.  In vivo human retinal imaging by ultrahigh-speed spectral domain optical coherence tomography. , 2004, Optics letters.

[14]  S. Yun,et al.  Real-time fiber-based multi-functional spectral-domain optical coherence tomography at 1.3 microm. , 2005, Optics express.

[15]  J. Izatt,et al.  In vivo imaging of human retinal flow dynamics by color Doppler optical coherence tomography. , 2003, Archives of ophthalmology.

[16]  Yuankai K. Tao,et al.  Single-pass volumetric bidirectional blood flow imaging spectral domain optical coherence tomography using a modified Hilbert transform. , 2008, Optics express.

[17]  T. Yatagai,et al.  Optical coherence angiography. , 2006, Optics express.