Optical coherence tomography measurements of biological fluid flows with picolitre spatial localization

Abstract

Interest in studying the human and animal microcirculation has burgeoned in recent years. In part this has been driven by recent advances in volumetric microscopy modalities, which allow the study of the 3-D morphology of the microcirculation without the limitations of 2-D intra-vital microscopy. In this paper we highlight the power of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to image the normal and pathological microcirculation with picolitre voxel sizes. Both Doppler and speckle-variance methods are employed to characterize complex rheological flows both in-vitro and in-vivo. GPU accelerated image registration methods are demonstrated in order to mitigate problems of bulk tissue motion in methods based on speckle decorrelation. In-vivo images of the human nailfold microcirculation are shown.