Abstract

Introduction Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), a functional extension of optical coherence tomography (OCT), offers an opportunity to visualize blood vessel network within a tissue volume at the capillary level noninvasively and in real time. Whereas the widespread usage of OCTA is hindered by the trade-off between transverse sampling rate and signal to noise ratio (SNR), which results in loss of capillary fine details due to under-sampling in achieving larger field of view. Increasing A-scan rate with ultrahigh speed sources and detection modules is a potential solution to this problem. Whereas, increase in A-scan rate decrease OCT signal and therefore speed is ultimately limited by the signal to noise requirements given the constraint of allowable light exposure. In addition, motion artifacts with high spatial frequencies, such as thin lines caused by microsaccades and pulsatile heart beat obscure capillary fine details.

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