U.3.2.3 Angiographic Exams
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#### U.3.2.3 Angiographic Exams

Some color retinal imaging studies are done to determine vascular caliber of retinal vessels, which can vary throughout the cardiac cycle. Images are captured while connected to an ECG machine or a cardiac pulse monitor allowing image acquisition to be synchronized to the cardiac cycle.

Angiography is a procedure that requires a dye to be injected into the patient for the purpose of enhancing the imaging of vascular structures in the eye. A standard step in this procedure is imaging the eye at specified intervals to detect the pooling of small amounts of dye and/or blood in the retina. For a doctor or technician to properly interpret angiography images it is important to know how much time had elapsed between the dye being injected in the patient (time 0) and the image frame being taken. It is known that such dyes can have an affect on OPT tomographic images as well (and it may be possible to use such dyes to enhance vascular structure in the OPT images), therefore time synchronization will be applied to the creation of the OPT images as well as any associated OP images

The angiographic acquisition is instantiated as a multi-frame OPT Image. The variable time increments between frames of the image are captured in the Frame Time Vector of the OPT Multi-frame Module. For multiple sets of images, e.g., sets of retinal scan images, the Slice Location Vector will be used in addition to the Frame Time Vector. For 5 sets of 6 scans there will be 30 frames in the multi-frame image. The first 6 values in the Frame Time Vector will give the time from injection to the first set of scans, the second 6 will contain the time interval for the second set of 6 scans, and so on, for a total of 5 time intervals.

Another example of an angiographic study with related sets of images is a sequence of SLO/OCT/"ICG filtered" image triples (or SLO/OCT image pairs) that are time-stamped relative to a user-defined event. This user-defined event usually corresponds to the inject time of ICG (indocyanine green) into the patients blood stream. The resultant images form an angiography study where the patient's blood flow can be observed with the "ICG filtered" images and can be correlated with the pathologies observed in the SLO and OCT images that are spatially related to the ICG image with a pixel-to-pixel correspondence on the X-Y plane.

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