Comparing algorithms for dynamic contrast on full-field, swept-source, and spectral-domain OCT

Dynamic optical coherence tomography (DOCT) extends the non-invasive tomographic imaging capabilities of OCT with a label-free functional contrasting. Depending on the used OCT system’s parameters, like spectral bandwidth and numerical aperture, various aspects like cell motility and metabolic organelle activity can be observed with varying sensitivity. However, multiple methods to access these signal fluctuations exist and have been developed in parallel by several research groups, optimized for their respective imaging setups and typical samples. In this work, we compare four of the leading DOCT algorithms, such as HSB visualization of power-spectral-density moments, RGB frequency binning, logarithmic-intensity-variance-based metrics, and motility-based metrics. To fully analyse the strengths of each, we evaluate them on a variety of samples, which have been captured with different imaging systems, utilizing different implementations (time-domain and Fourier domain), acquisition speeds, and resolutions. Therefore, unveiling specific advantages of several metrics, allowing for new visualization combinations to leverage them jointly.