We present measurements of total retinal blood flow in healthy volunteers using a three beam Doppler optical coherence tomography (D-OCT) technique. This technology has the advantage of a precise determination of the flow vector without the use of any a-priori information on the vessel geometry. Circular D-OCT scans around the optic disc were recorded and venous as well as arterial total blood flow was determined and compared for each subject. The reproducibility of the method was assessed in 6 subjects by repeated measurements. Only small deviations of around 6% between the measurements were found which indicates the high precision of the proposed method. Werkmeister, "Blood flow velocity vector field reconstruction from dual-beam bidirectional Doppler OCT measurements in retinal veins," Biomed. Opt. Express 6(5), 1599-1615 (2015). 38. C. E. Riva, J. E. Grunwald, S. H. Sinclair, and B. L. Petrig, "Blood velocity and volumetric flow rate in human retinal vessels," Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 26(8), 1124-1132 (1985). 39. J. P. Garcia, Jr., P. T. Garcia, and R. B. Rosen, "Retinal blood flow in the normal human eye using the canon laser blood flowmeter," Ophthalmic Res. 34(5), 295-299 (2002

Conventional imaging of the human cornea with optical coherence tomography (OCT) relies on telecentric scanning optics with sampling beams that are parallel to the optical axis of the eye. Because of the shape of the cornea, the beams have in some areas considerable inclination to the corneal surface which is accompanied by low signal intensities in these areas and thus an inhomogeneous appearance of corneal structures. In addition, alterations in the polarization state of the probing light depend on the angle between the imaging beam and the birefringent axis of the sample. Therefore, changes in the polarization state observed with polarization-sensitive (PS-) OCT originate mainly from the shape of the cornea. In order to minimize the effects of the corneal shape on intensity and polarization-sensitive based data, we developed a conical scanning optics design. This design provides imaging beams that are essentially orthogonal to the corneal surface. Thus, high signal intensity throughout the entire imaged volume is obtained and the influence of the corneal shape on polarization-sensitive data is greatly reduced. We demonstrate the benefit of the concept by comparing PS-OCT imaging results of the human cornea in healthy volunteers using both scanning schemes.

We present a novel active-passive path-length encoded (APPLE) swept source Doppler optical coherence tomography (DOCT) approach, enabling three-dimensional velocity vector reconstruction of moving particles without prior knowledge of the orientation of motion. The developed APPLE DOCT setup allows for non-invasive blood flow measurements and was primarily designed for quantitative human ocular blood flow investigations. The system's performance was demonstrated by flow phantom as well as retinal vessel bifurcation measurements. Furthermore, total retinal blood flow - a biomarker aiding in diagnosis and monitoring of major ocular diseases such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy or central/branch retinal vein occlusion - was determined in the eyes of healthy human volunteers.

The high acquisition speed of state-of-the-art optical coherence tomography (OCT) enables massive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvements by signal averaging. Here, we investigate the performance of two commonly used approaches for OCT signal averaging. We present the theoretical SNR performance of (a) computing the average of OCT magnitude data and (b) averaging the complex phasors, and substantiate our findings with simulations and experimentally acquired OCT data. We show that the achieved SNR performance strongly depends on both the SNR of the input signals and the number of averaged signals when the signal bias caused by the noise floor is not accounted for. Therefore we also explore the SNR for the two averaging approaches after correcting for the noise bias and, provided that the phases of the phasors are accurately aligned prior to averaging, then find that complex phasor averaging always leads to higher SNR than magnitude averaging.

We introduce multi-directional optical coherence tomography (OCT), a technique for investigation of the scattering properties of directionally reflective tissue samples. By combining the concepts of multi-channel and directional OCT, this approach enables simultaneous acquisition of multiple reflectivity depth-scans probing a mutual sample location from differing angular orientations. The application of multi-directional OCT in retinal imaging allows for in-depth investigations on the directional reflectivity of the retinal nerve fiber layer, Henle’s fiber layer and the photoreceptor layer. Major ophthalmic diseases (such as glaucoma or age-related macular degeneration) have been reported to alter the directional reflectivity properties of these retinal layers. Hence, the concept of multi-directional OCT might help to gain improved understanding of pathology development and progression. As a first step, we demonstrate the capabilities of multi-directional OCT in the eyes of healthy human volunteers.