Large scale mapping of the cortical microvascular velocities by the dynamic light scattering optical coherence tomography

We present a framework to coregister a large set of blood flow measurements from the cortical microvascular segments obtained by DLS-OCT with the microvascular angiogram obtained using TPM. By using this framework, we estimated the distributions of the mean RBC velocities in arterioles, venules, and capillaries, and as a function of the branching order from over 1,000 microvascular segments. The developed tools will help with more quantitative analysis of the large data sets obtained by OCT and TPM in the studies involving normal brain functioning, progression of various diseases, and numerical modeling of the oxygen transport in the microvascular networks.