Gabor optical coherence tomographic angiography (GOCTA) (Part I): human retinal imaging in vivo

Recently, parallel high A-line speed and wide field imaging for optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) has become more prevalent, resulting in a dramatic increase of data quantity which poses a challenge for real time imaging even for GPU in data processing. In this manuscript, we propose a new OCTA processing technique, Gabor optical coherence tomographic angiography (GOCTA), for label-free human retinal angiography imaging. In spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SDOCT), k-space resampling and Fourier transform (FFT) are required for the entire data set of interference fringes to calculate blood flow information in previous OCTA algorithms, which are computationally intensive. As adults' eye anterior-posterior radii are nearly constant, only 3 A-scan lines need to be processed to obtain the gross orientation of the retina by using a sphere model. Subsequently, the en face microvascular images can be obtained by using the GOCTA algorithm from interference fringes directly without the steps of k-space resampling, numerical dispersion compensation, FFT, and maximum (mean) projection, resulting in a significant improvement of the data processing speed by 4 to 20 times faster than the existing methods. GOCTA is potentially suitable for SDOCT systems in en face preview applications requiring real-time microvascular imaging.