Tail artifacts removal of three-dimensional optical coherence tomography angiography with common parts extraction method

In optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), each blood vessel has a tail artifact. These tails of superficial vessels will shadow underlying the deep vascular images and make it difficult to reconstruct the three-dimensional (3D) image of the vessels. As 3D structure can provide much more information than two-dimensional (2D) images, it is important to develop a method to remove the artifacts. In this letter, we introduce an image processing technique based on common parts extraction to remove the artifacts. With the help of subtraction operation and erode operation, our method can reconstruct the 3D image of vascular network by extracting the common parts of adjacent B-Scan OCTA images. Vessels of palm are used as samples to experimentally demonstrate our technique. In the 3D image, we can see the interesting phenomenon that the ends of the blood vessels which close to the surface of the skin point toward the surface.