Optical coherence tomography angiography integrating differential phase and intensity images for in vivo imaging of a mouse retina

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) suffers from more motion artifacts compared to optical coherence tomography, which are the primary source of image quality degradation in in vivo imaging. We propose an OCTA algorithm in this Letter that differs from motion compensation methods widely employed to reduce motion artifacts and effectively mitigates these artifacts. The algorithm integrates differential phase and intensity images based on the standard deviation of the flow signals. The performance of this algorithm is evaluated on mouse retina in vivo imaging. Compared to three conventional OCTA algorithms, the OCTA images obtained by the proposed algorithm exhibit fewer motion artifacts and less noise in tissue regions, with maximum improvements of 1.38 dB and 0.82 in signal-to-noise ratio and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), respectively, in the maximum projection of en face images.