Spectroscopic-speckle variance OCT for microvasculature detection and analysis

We propose and studied optical coherence tomography (OCT) combining spectroscopic (SOCT) and speckle variance (svOCT) functions to effectively detect locations of microvasculatures and assess blood oxygen saturation level. Chorioallantoic membrane of a chick embryo was imaged in vivo to perform the analysis of the system. We also studied the effect of speckle in spectral domain using experimental data and performed time-averaging to reduce speckle noise locally. We combined SOCT and svOCT images using hue, saturation and value (HSV) color map to show the localized spectroscopic property of blood. Results show distinct spectroscopic properties between arterial blood and capillary blood. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America