A Novel Automatic 3D Stitching Algorithm for Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography and Its Application in Dermatology

Yubo Ji, Kanheng Zhou, Sally Helen Ibbotson, Ruikang K. Wang, Chunhui Li (Lead / Corresponding author), Zhihong Huang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

13 Citations (Scopus)
260 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) and OCT angiography (OCTA) techniques offer numerous advantages in clinical skin applications but the field of view (FOV) of current commercial systems are relatively limited to cover the entire skin lesion. The typical method to expand the FOV is to apply wide field objective lens. However, lateral resolution is often sacrificed when scanning with these lenses. To overcome this drawback, we developed an automated 3D stitching method for creating high-resolution skin structure and vascular volumes with large field of view, which was realized by montaging multiple adjacent OCT and OCTA volumes. The proposed stitching method is demonstrated by montaging 3 × 3 OCT and OCTA volumes (nine OCT/OCTA volumes as one data set with each volume covers 2.5 cm × 2.5 cm area) of healthy thin and thick skin from six volunteers. The proposed stitching protocol achieves high flexibility and repeatable for all the participants. Moreover, according to evaluation of structural similarity index and feature similarity index, our proposed stitched result has a superior similarity to single scanning protocol in large-scaled. We had also verified its improved performance through assessing metrics of vessel contrast-noise-ratio (CNR) from 2.07 ± 0.44 (single large-scaled scanning protocol) to 3.05 ± 0.51 (proposed 3 × 3 sub-volume stitching method).

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere202100152
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of Biophotonics
Volume14
Issue number11
Early online date14 Jul 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2021

Keywords

  • OCT
  • OCTA
  • 3D stitching
  • Dermatology
  • dermatology

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Engineering
  • General Physics and Astronomy
  • General Chemistry
  • General Biochemistry,Genetics and Molecular Biology
  • General Materials Science

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