Using the Dynamic Forward Scattering Signal for Optical Coherence Tomography based Blood Flow Quantification

Abstract

To our knowledge, all existing optical coherence tomography approaches for quantifying blood flow, whether Doppler-based or decorrelation-based, analyze light that is back-scattered by moving red blood cells (RBCs). This work investigates the potential advantages of basing these measurements on light that is forward-scattered by RBCs, i.e., by looking at the signals back-scattered from below the vessel. We show experimentally that this results in a flowmetry measure that is insensitive to vessel orientation for vessels that are approximately orthogonal to the imaging beam. We further provide proof-of-principle demonstrations that DFS can be used to measure flow in human retinal and choroidal vessels.