Visualization of human retinal capillary networks: A comparison of intensity, speckle-variance and phase-variance optical coherence tomography

We evaluate methods to visualize human retinal micro-circulation in vivo by standard intensity-based optical coherence tomography (OCT), speckle-variance optical coherence tomography (svOCT), and phase-variance optical coherence tomography (pvOCT). En face projection views created from the same volumetric data set of the human retina using all three data processing methods are created and compared. Additionally we used support vector machine (SVM) based semi-automatic segmentation to generate en face projection views of individual retinal layers. The layers include: first, the whole inner retina (from the nerve fiber layer to the outer nuclear layer), and second, from the ganglion cell layer to the outer nuclear layer. Finally, we compare the retinal vasculature images processed from the three OCT techniques and fluorescein angiography (FA). © 2012 SPIE.