Motion-insensitive optical coherence tomography based micro-angiography.

An improved image processing procedure for suppressing the phase noise due to a motion artifact acquired during optical coherence tomography scanning and effectively illustrating the blood vessel distribution in a living tissue is demonstrated. This new processing procedure and the widely used procedure for micro-angiography application are based on the selection of high-frequency components in the spatial-frequency spectrum of B-mode scanning (x-space), which are contributed from the image portions of moving objects. However, by switching the processing order between the x-space and k-space, the new processing procedure shows the superior function of effectively suppressing the phase noise due to a motion artifact. After the blood vessel positions are precisely acquired based on the new processing procedure, the projected blood flow speed can be more accurately calibrated based on a previously reported method. The demonstrated new procedure is useful for clinical micro-angiography application, in which a stepping motor of generating motion artifacts is usually used in the scanning probe.