Volumetric absolute blood flow measurement with fully connected vasculature network using Doppler optical coherence tomography

Doppler optical coherence tomography (DOCT) is a promising functional imaging modality for quantitative blood flow measurement. A major limitation of DOCT is that only the axial component of flow can be measured, which is strongly influenced by the geometry of the vasculature. To overcome this challenge, we proposed a new method to retrieve absolute blood flow velocity of the vascular networks with fully restored topology. The application of open active snake can detect the skeleton of vasculature network without the need of vasculature segmentation, allowing Doppler angle to be calculated. The discontinuity of vasculature induced by Doppler angle and the limited dynamic range is corrected by a tensor voting based method, enabling the measurement of absolute blood flow velocity along each fully connected vessel branch. We present the results of in vivo cerebral blood flow (CBF) networks to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.