Plexus-specific micro-vascular pathologies defined by optical coherence tomographic angiography Public Deposited
Optical coherence tomographic angiography (OCTA) has been successfully used in ophthalmol-ogy, providing noninvasive, non-dye-based, high-speed, and depth-resolved imaging of retinal and choroidal circulatory networks in vivo at capillary-scale detail. OCTA is able to detect capillary dropout and nonexudative choroidal neovascularization (CNV), which may be missed by traditional imaging modalities such as fluorescein angiograph (FA) / indocyanine green angiograph (ICGA), and are risk factors for vision loss. However, conventional/commercial automated OCTA processing plat-forms are limited by (i) projection artifacts causing specious flow signal mimicking the morphology of superficial vasculature to appear in deeper anatomic layers and further leading to misinterpretation of retinal vascular disorders, (ii) automated rules-based retinal vascular disorders detection algorithms that fail on low quality scans, and (iii) a limited field of view that cannot image the entire retina. This dissertation presents technical achievements in plexus-specific micro-vascular disorder detection on OCTA, including (i) projection artifacts removal, (ii) macular ischemia detection in vascular layers in the inner retina, (iii) CNV detection in the outer retina, and (iv) wide-field OCTA generated by stitching miltiple small-field OCTA seamlessly.