Generating large field of view en-face projection images from intra-acquisition motion compensated volumetric optical coherence tomography data

A technique to generate large field of view projection maps of arbitrary optical coherence tomography (OCT) data is described. The technique is divided into two stages an image acquisition stage that features a simple to use fast and robust retinal tracker to get motion free retinal OCT volume scans and a stitching stage where OCT data from different retinal locations is first registered against a reference image using a custom pyramid-based approach and finally stitched together into one seamless large field of view (FOV) image. The method is applied to data recorded with a polarization sensitive OCT instrument in healthy subjects and glaucoma patients. The tracking and stitching accuracies are quantified, and finally, large FOV images of retinal nerve fiber layer retardation that contain the arcuate nerve fiber bundles from the optic nerve head to the raphe are demonstrated. Published by The Optical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.