Cross‐scanning optical coherence tomography angiography for eye motion correction

We propose a cross‐scanning optical coherence tomography (CS‐OCT) system to correct eye motion artifacts in OCT angiography images. This system employs a dual‐illumination configuration with two orthogonally polarized beams, each of which simultaneously perform raster scanning in perpendicular direction with each other over the same area. In the reference arm, a polarization delay unit is used to acquire the two orthogonally polarized interferograms with a single photo detector by introducing different optical delay lines. The two cross‐scanned volume data are affected by the same eye motion but in two orthogonal directions. We developed a motion correction algorithm, which removes artifacts in the slow axis of each angiogram using the other and merges them through a nonrigid registration algorithm. In this manner, we obtained a motion‐corrected angiogram within a single volume scanning time without additional eye‐tracking devices. We present a novel method to correct eye motion artifacts in OCT angiography images using a cross‐scanning optical coherence tomography (CS‐OCT) system. The CS‐OCT is a newly developed system that employs a dual illumination configuration with orthogonally polarized two beams, each of which simultaneously performs raster scanning in a perpendicular direction with each other over the same area. Since the cross‐scanned two volume data are affected by the same eye motion, we remove motion artifacts using each other and obtain a motion‐free angiogram within a single volume scanning time without additional hardware such as eye‐tracking devices.