Blood flow rate estimation in optic disc capillaries and vessels using Doppler optical coherence tomography

Ocular blood flow measurement may have a number of potential applications that explore the relationship between blood flow in the eye and diseases such as: diabetic retinopathy, ocular artery obstruction, hypertensive retinopathy and Alzheimer's disease. Reliable and quantitative method for retinal blood flow estimation is still to be created. Doppler OCT is one of candidates for such a method, but suffers from a number of limitations. Recently we proposed a solution to one of the most prominent artefacts in Doppler OCT, which is the phase wrapping problem. This allows for precise recovery of velocity profile the Doppler OCT technique remains sensitive to temporal dependence of the result on the blood flow velocity changing with the pulse during the OCT measurement. In this report we explore this problem and show that the synchronization of the OCT measurement with heart beats only partially gives control over the acquired blood flows.