Single-shot angular compounded optical coherence tomography angiography by splitting full-space B-scan modulation spectrum for flow contrast enhancement.

Abstract

We proposed a single-shot spatial angular compounded optical coherence tomography angiography (AC-Angio-OCT) for blood flow contrast enhancement. By encoding incident angles in B-scan modulation frequencies and splitting the modulation spectrum in the spatial frequency domain, angle-resolved independent subangiograms were obtained and compounded to improve the flow contrast. A full space of the spatial frequency domain allows a wide modulation spectrum. To get access to the full space of the spatial frequency domain and avoid the complex-conjugate ambiguity of the modulation spectrum, a complex-valued OCT spectral interferogram was retrieved by removing one of the conjugate terms in the depth space. To validate the proposed concept, both flow phantom and live animal experiments were performed. The proposed AC-Angio-OCT offers a ∼50% decrease of misclassification errors, and an improved flow contrast and vessel connectivity, which contributes to the interpretation of OCT angiograms.