Optical coherence tomography microvascular imaging method based on svOCT and cmOCT

OCT is a new imaging technology based on the principle of Michelson interferometer to perform tomography of sample tissue. OCT has the characteristics of high-resolution, non-invasive, real-time detection, and non-destructive imaging. The OCT vascular imaging method can generate high-contrast microvascular images without injecting a contrast agent. This paper presents a new microvascular imaging method (sv-cmOCT) that combines two existing microvascular imaging methods - speckle variance optical coherence tomography (svOCT) and correlation mapping optical coherence tomography (cmOCT). The binarised image of svOCT is used to mask the cmOCT image, which can effectively suppress background noise and static artefacts, and ultimately generate a microvascular image with high contrast. In this paper, blood flow mimic experiments and animal experiments were designed to validate the imaging performance of the microvascular imaging method. It is demonstrated that the proposed method can improve the signal-to-noise ratio of microvascular images well compared to methods such as svOCT and cmOCT and B-scan mask cmOCT.