Automated non-rigid registration and mosaicing for robust imaging of distinct retinal capillary beds using speckle variance optical coherence tomography

Variance processing methods in Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) have enabled depth-resolved visualization of the capillary beds in the retina due to the development of imaging systems capable of acquiring A-scan data in the 100 kHz regime. However, acquisition of volumetric variance data sets still requires several seconds of acquisition time, even with high speed systems. Movement of the subject during this time span is sufficient to corrupt visualization of the vasculature. We demonstrate a method to eliminate motion artifacts in speckle variance FD-OCT images of the retinal vasculature by creating a composite image from multiple volumes of data acquired sequentially. Slight changes in the orientation of the subject’s eye relative to the optical system between acquired volumes may result in non-rigid warping of the image. Thus, we use a B-spline based free form deformation method to automatically register variance images from multiple volumes to obtain a motion-free composite image of the retinal vessels. We extend this technique to automatically mosaic individual vascular images into a widefield image of the retinal vasculature.