title: Optical coherence tomography based angiography [Invited].
abstract: Optical coherence tomography (OCT)-based angiography (OCTA) providesin vivo, three-dimensional vascular information by the use of flowing red blood cells as intrinsic contrast agents, enabling the visualization of functional vessel networks within microcirculatory tissue beds non-invasively, without a need of dye injection. Because of these attributes, OCTA has been rapidly translated to clinical ophthalmology within a short period of time in the development. Various OCTA algorithms have been developed to detect the functional micro-vasculaturesin vivoby utilizing different components of OCT signals, including phase-signal-based OCTA, intensity-signal-based OCTA and complex-signal-based OCTA. All these algorithms have shown, in one way or another, their clinical values in revealing micro-vasculatures in biological tissuesin vivo, identifying abnormal vascular networks or vessel impairment zones in retinal and skin pathologies, detecting vessel patterns and angiogenesis in eyes with age-related macular degeneration and in skin and brain with tumors, and monitoring responses to hypoxia in the brain tissue. The purpose of this paper is to provide a technical oriented overview of the OCTA developments and their potential pre-clinical and clinical applications, and to shed some lights on its future perspectives. Because of its clinical translation to ophthalmology, this review intentionally places a slightly more weight on ophthalmic OCT angiography.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington, 3720 15th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98195, USA; Department of Ophthalmology, University of Washington, 325 9th Ave, Seattle, WA 98104, USA.
authors.forename: Chieh-Li
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington, 3720 15th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98195, USA; Department of Ophthalmology, University of Washington, 325 9th Ave, Seattle, WA 98104, USA.
authors.forename: Ruikang K
authors.initials: RK
authors.lastname: Wang
keywords: (110.4500) Optical coherence tomography; (170.2655) Functional monitoring and imaging; (170.3880) Medical and biological imaging