A method for correcting periodic motion artifacts in optical coherence tomography for enhanced vascular imaging

Decorrelation-based optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a widely utilized technique that leverages OCT intensity data for imaging. Nevertheless, the quality of these images is often compromised by the cardiac and respiratory motions in animals. These cyclical bulk motions, particularly in the C-Scan (slow scan) direction, obstruct motion correction by altering the scan position and the OCT structure. While various correction methods have been proposed, they frequently result in the loss of vascular information under substantial bulk motion conditions. In this study, we present a novel correction method employing a stitch scan protocol in the C-Scan direction. By setting a threshold for the maximum value of normalized cross-correlation among repeated B-Scan intensity signals, we effectively exclude false OCT B-scans. In vivo imaging experiments on mice demonstrate that our bulk method preserves the complete vascular information and significantly improves image quality.