Comparison of amplitude-decorrelation, speckle-variance and phase-variance OCT angiography methods for imaging the human retina and choroid.

We compared the performance of three OCT angiography (OCTA) methods: speckle variance, amplitude decorrelation and phase variance for imaging of the human retina and choroid. Two averaging methods, split spectrum and volume averaging, were compared to assess the quality of the OCTA vascular images. All data were acquired using a swept-source OCT system at 1040 nm central wavelength, operating at 100,000 A-scans/s. We performed a quantitative comparison using a contrast-to-noise (CNR) metric to assess the capability of the three methods to visualize the choriocapillaris layer. For evaluation of the static tissue noise suppression in OCTA images we proposed to calculate CNR between the photoreceptor/RPE complex and the choriocapillaris layer. Finally, we demonstrated that implementation of intensity-based OCT imaging and OCT angiography methods allows for visualization of retinal and choroidal vascular layers known from anatomic studies in retinal preparations. OCT projection imaging of data flattened to selected retinal layers was implemented to visualize retinal and choroidal vasculature. User guided vessel tracing was applied to segment the retinal vasculature. The results were visualized in a form of a skeletonized 3D model.