Ergodic speckle contrast optical coherence tomography velocimetry of rapid blood flow

Visualizing a 3D blood flow velocity field through noninvasive imaging is crucial for analyzing hemodynamic mechanisms in areas prone to disorders. However, traditional correlation-based optical coherence tomography (OCT) velocimetry techniques have a maximum measurable flow velocity depending on the A-line rate. We presented the ergodic speckle contrast OCT (ESCOCT) to break the bottleneck in measuring the rapid blood flow velocity. It achieved a measurement of blood flow velocity ranging from 9.5 to 280 mm/s using a 100 kHz swept-source (SS) OCT based on 100 A-repeats scanning mode. Addressing the non-ergodic problem of temporal OCT signals by integrating more consecutive A-scans, ESCOCT can enable the estimation for lower velocity flows by increasing A-repeats. ESCOCT provided a wide dynamic range with no upper limit on measuring blood flow velocity with an adequate signal-to-noise ratio and improved the sensitivity and accuracy of the hemodynamic assessment.