Volumetric montaging of optical coherence tomography in human retinas

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has transformed clinical eye care by providing high-resolution volumetric imaging of the retina. Recently, ultrawide-field-of-view (FOV) OCT played an increasingly significant clinical role; however, most clinical OCT systems offer only a rather limited FOV. We increased the FOV of clinical OCT by volumetrically montaging multiple OCT datasets in three dimensions (3D). We performed volumetric montaging by representing the internal limiting membrane (ILM) and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) in each volume as point clouds and using these point clouds to compute transformations that map each volume to a common reference frame. We validated our methodology using datasets from three institutions with different OCT hardware and data-acquisition procedures. Using the mean surface distance between point clouds, we found the error in montaging was less than the lateral pixel size. Our method enabled existing clinical OCT to achieve ultrawide FOV imaging without any hardware modification.