Periodic bulk motion correction method in decorrelation-based optical coherence tomography angiography

Decorrelation-based OCTA is a widely used optical coherence tomography angiography method which utilizes OCT intensity information. However, cardiac and respiratory motions in animals are seriously degrade image quality. These kind of bulk motion is periodic, and its C-Scan (slow scan) direction component hinder motion correction because of scan position and OCT structure's change. Some correction methods were proposed, but vasculature information will be lost when larger bulk motion occur. Here we demonstrate a correction method which uses stitch scan protocol in C-Scan direction, and sets a threshold to the maximum value of normalized cross-correlation among repeated B-Scan intensity signal to exclude false OCT B-scans. Result of In vivo imaging experiment for mice indicates that our method can reserve whole vasculature information and effectively improve image quality.