Quantitative Applications of Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography in Ophthalmology

Abstract

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) angiography (OCTA) is a recently developed non-invasive functional imaging technique that have been widely utilized in ophthalmology. OCTA is capable of providing three dimensional detailed information of ocular vasculature and has great potentials for vascular quantification. In this thesis, OCTA’s capacity in imaging microvasculature in great detail was demonstrated in human eyes, techniques to improve image quality and contrast were proposed and validated. With clinically available OCTA systems’ data, quantitative analysis tools for both retinal choroidal microvasculature were developed and tested on diseased subjects. The reliability of proposed quantitative algorithms was tested with intra-visit scans and the robustness was tested with data from a wide range of disease diagnoses. Overall, this dissertation presents a set of tools that can describe the integrity of human ocular microvasculature reliably and objectively.