Abstract
We demonstrate noninvasive structural and microvascular contrast imaging of human skin in vivo, using phase difference swept source OCT angiography (pOCTA). The pOCTA system employs an akinetic, all-semiconductor, highly phase-stable swept laser source which operates at 1340 nm central wavelength, with 37 nm bandwidth (at 0 dB region) and 200 kHz A-scan rate. The phase sensitive detection does not need any external phase stabilizing implementations, due to the outstanding high phase linearity and sweep phase repeatability within 2 mrad. We compare the performance of phase based OCTA to speckle based OCTA for visualizing human vascular networks. pOCTA shows better contrast especially for deeper vascular details as compared to speckle based OCTA. The phase stability of the akinetic source allows the OCTA system to show decent vascular contrast only with 2 B-scans. We compare the performance of using 2 versus 4 B-scans for calculating the vascular contrast. Finally, the performance of a 100 nm bandwidth akinetic laser at 1310 nm is investigated for both OCT and OCTA.
Highlights
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is currently the most successful functional extension of OCT, due to the fact that it can be implemented in any OCT platform and it meets an immediate clinical diagnostic need [1,2,3,4]
We demonstrate noninvasive structural and microvascular contrast imaging of human skin in vivo, using phase difference swept source OCT angiography
The phase difference swept source OCT angiography (pOCTA) system operates at a 1340 nm central wavelength with a bandwidth of 37 nm and a sweep repetition rate of 200 kHz
Summary
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is currently the most successful functional extension of OCT, due to the fact that it can be implemented in any OCT platform and it meets an immediate clinical diagnostic need [1,2,3,4]. OCT intensity data alone provides high contrast and sensitivity, but misses important tissue specificity as well as valuable physiological information [5]. The latter is provided by functional extensions of OCT, such as Doppler OCT (DOCT) to assess blood flow [6]. It has already been shown with early Time Domain OCT (TD-OCT) that DOCT is able to assess blood flow quantitatively as well as using the flow signature to contrast vascular structure [6,7,8]. One has co-registered anatomical structure and vascular structure from OCT
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