Real time color Doppler optical coherence tomography using a novel autocorrelation technique

Summary form only given. Color Doppler optical coherence tomography (CDOCT) is a functional extension of optical coherence tomography (OCT) which can image flow in turbid media with micronscale spatial resolution. In CDOCT, flow velocity information is encoded in the Doppler shift of the probe light by moving scatterers in the sample. The scanning optical delay line in the reference arm of a CDOCT interferometer imposes a Doppler shift on the reference light, therefore, the Doppler information indicating flow in the sample can be detected as a frequency offset from the center frequency of the detector response signal. In previous implementations of CDOCT, this information has been extracted offline by digital signal processing of the acquired image data. This type of processing is computationally intensive and may not be suitable for real-time blood flow imaging.