Background: Examination of the skin’s vascular and structural features is essential in clinical, medical, and research dermatology. However, there is a lack of comprehensive imaging tools that clearly and accurately evaluates the skin’s vascular and structural features. Current techniques are invasive and have inherent preparatory drawbacks. Aim: To use optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) for a more accurate depiction of vessels in the skin without the use of a dye or other invasive techniques to visualize and asses the role of the skin’s vasculature during the process’ of wound healing. Method: We used an in-house-built, swept source-OCT system to perform OCTA analyses so as to image the vascular features of a cutaneous wound to a depth of 1.2 mm as it was healing. Key vascular parameters, such as vessel density and diameter, were measured at various depths to elucidate how depth might influence the vascular response. Observation: We found that alterations to the vasculature of the skin are linked to active healing. The first response of the superficial vessels observed here is to increase in diameter, whilst the first response of the deeper vessels is to increase in density. Additionally, the superficial vessels appear to normalize at an earlier compared to deeper vessels. Conclusion: OCTA is capable of imaging and distinguishing the complex collection of events that play pivotal roles in the repair of healthy skin that could be useful in the assessment of skin repair and treatment after injury or surgery.
When using optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), the development of artifacts due to involuntary movements can severely compromise the visualization and subsequent quantitation of tissue microvasculatures. To correct such an occurrence, we propose a motion compensation method to eliminate artifacts from human skin OCTA by means of step-by-step rigid affine registration, rigid subpixel registration, and nonrigid B-spline registration. To accommodate this remedial process, OCTA is conducted using two matching all-depth volume scans. Affine transformation is first performed on the large vessels of the deep reticular dermis, and then the resulting affine parameters are applied to all-depth vasculatures with a further subpixel registration to refine the alignment between superficial smaller vessels. Finally, the coregistration of both volumes is carried out to result in the final artifact-free composite image via an algorithm based upon cubic B-spline free-form deformation. We demonstrate that the proposed method can provide a considerable improvement to the final en face OCTA images with substantial artifact removal. In addition, the correlation coefficients and peak signal-to-noise ratios of the corrected images are evaluated and compared with those of the original images, further validating the effectiveness of the proposed method. We expect that the proposed method can be useful in improving qualitative and quantitative assessment of the OCTA images of scanned tissue beds.
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