Signal power decrease due to fringe washout as an extension of the limited Doppler flow measurement range in spectral...

The recently introduced new phase-dependent Doppler model for spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD OCT) has shown that the simple linear relation between the Doppler phase shift and the axial velocity component of an obliquely moving sample is not valid. Additionally, for nearly transverse sample motion with high velocities the phase shift will approach a constant value. Consequently, for small Doppler angles the velocity measurement range of the phase-resolved Doppler analysis is limited in SD OCT. Since these undesirable small Doppler angles can not be prevented, for example, in the in vivo 3-D measurement, we introduce a novel method extending the limited velocity detection range taking the signal power decrease due to fringe washout in SD OCT into account. The signal damping of an obliquely moving sample is presented as a function of the axial and transverse displacement by a universally valid contour plot and does not correspond simply to the sum of the axial and transverse effect. A quantitative combination of the Doppler analysis and the signal-damping method is presented with a flow phantom model. The practicability of this new combined method is presented for the blood flow of the saphenous artery in the in vivo mouse model.