Intensity-based modified Doppler variance algorithm: application to phase instable and phase stable optical coherence tomography systems

The traditional phase-resolved Doppler method demonstrates great success for in-vivo imaging of blood flow and blood vessels. However, the phase-resolved method always requires high phase stability of the system. In phase instable situations, the performance of the phase-resolved methods will be degraded. We propose a modified Doppler variance algorithm that is based on the intensity or amplitude value. Performances of the proposed algorithm are compared with traditional phase-resolved Doppler variance and color Doppler methods for both phase stable and phase instable systems. For the phase instable situation, the proposed algorithm demonstrates images without phase instability induced artifacts. In-vivo imaging of window-chamber hamster skin is demonstrated for phase instable situation with a spectrometer-based Fourier domain OCT system. A microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based swept source OCT (SSOCT) system is also used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method in a phase instable situation. The phase stability of the SSOCT system is analyzed. In-vivo imaging of the blood vessel of human skin is demonstrated with the proposed method and the SSOCT system. For the phase stable situation, the proposed algorithm also demonstrates comparable performance with traditional phase-resolved methods. In-vivo imaging of the human choroidal blood vessel network is demonstrated with the proposed method under the phase stable situation. Depth-resolved fine choroidal blood vessel networks are shown.