Ultra-high-speed volumetric tomography of human retinal blood flow

Applying novel detector development based on CMOS technology to Fourier domain optical coherence tomography we achieve depth profile rates up to 200,000 scans/sec. This speed allows for dramatic improvement for imaging small retinal details, such as photo-receptors and capillaries. We demonstrate the impact of this achievable speed to Doppler tomography and discuss advantages as well as short-comings of high speed 3D Doppler imaging of the human retina. Experimental data of 3D static D-FDOCT sets from fovea and nerve head region are shown together with first 4D imaging of retinal capillary flow. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America