Optical flow optical coherence tomography for determining accurate velocity fields

Abstract

Traditional methods for quantifying micro-fluid velocity using optical coherence tomography (OCT) can be divided into either phase-based or amplitude-based methods. Phase-based methods are less sensitive to the transverse velocity components and suffer from wrapped phase and phase instability problems, while amplitude-based methods focus more on segmenting flow areas instead of quantifying velocities. To solve these problems, we propose a method we termed optical flow optical coherence tomography (OFOCT) that can accurately compute spatially resolved velocity fields. An iterative solution to the proposed method is implemented using the graphics processing unit (GPU) for real-time data processing. The accuracy of the proposed method is verified through phantom flow experiments.