Apparatus and methods for three dimensional optical imaging of dynamics with reduced motion artifacts

Abstract

The present system employs optical coherence tomography (OCT) or optical coherence microscopy (OCM) systems, including ultra-high resolution Gabor-domain optical coherence microscopy (GD-OCM), into a 3D flow imaging technique. This technique models the repeated scans as Gaussian latent variables, with the common variance representing both static tissue structure and dynamic blood flow, and the anisotropic unique variance representing tissue motion in specific frames. Since the motion generated variance is independent from that of the structure or the flow, by iteratively maximizing the combined log-likelihood probability of these two variances modeled through exploratory factor analysis, the unique variance (or the tissue motion) may be largely excluded. In the common variance, the dynamic blood flow may be separated from the static tissue structure, by integrating the factors that represent the relatively low levels of correlation. Compared to a direct differentiation of OCT or OCM scans, the present flow imaging algorithm improves the visualization of capillaries with reduced motion artifacts.