Flow rate estimation by optical coherence tomography using contrast dilution approach

摘要

This paper describes experiments and methodology for flow rate estimation using optical coherence tomography and dilution method in single fiber setup. The single fiber is created from custom made glass capillary and polypropylene hollow fiber. As a data source, measurements on single fiber phantom with continuous flow of carrier medium and bolus of Intralipid solution as a contrast agent were used using Thorlabs OCT OCS1300SS. The measured data were processed by methods of image processing, in order to precisely align the individual images in the sequence and extract dilution curves from the area inside the fiber. An experiment proved that optical coherence tomography can be used for flow rate estimation by the dilution method with precision around 7%.