Phase-resolved optical Doppler tomography (ODT) has very high sensitivity while maintaining a fast axial scanning rate, making it possible to reconstruct blood flow in three dimensions. Here we demonstrate an ODT system that employed novel signal-processing techniques to remove aliasing effects and artifacts caused by lateral scanning and target movement. The results show that these techniques not only simplified ODT, but also improved lateral scanning speed. Using these signal-processing techniques, three-dimensional images of in vivo blood vessels in human skin were then reconstructed.

The Doppler bandwidth extracted from the standard deviation of the frequency shift in phase-resolved functional optical coherence tomography (F-OCT) was used to image the velocity component that is transverse to the optical probing beam. It was found that above a certain threshold level the Doppler bandwidth is a linear function of flow velocity and that the effective numerical aperture of the optical objective in the sample arm determines the slope of this dependence. The Doppler bandwidth permits accurate measurement of flow velocity without the need for precise determination of flow direction when the Doppler flow angle is within +/-15 degrees perpendicular to the probing beam. Such an approach extends the dynamic range of flow velocity measurements obtained with the phase-resolved F-OCT.