Real-time 4D signal processing and visualization using graphics processing unit on a regular nonlinear-k Fourier-domain OCT system

We realized graphics processing unit (GPU) based real-time 4D (3D + time) signal processing and visualization on a regular Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) system with a nonlinear k-space spectrometer. An ultra-high speed linear spline interpolation (LSI) method for λ-to-k spectral re-sampling is implemented in the GPU architecture, which gives average interpolation speeds of >3,000,000 line/s for 1024-pixel OCT (1024-OCT) and >1,400,000 line/s for 2048-pixel OCT (2048-OCT). The complete FD-OCT signal processing including λ-to-k spectral re-sampling, fast Fourier transform (FFT) and post-FFT processing have all been implemented on a GPU. The maximum complete A-scan processing speeds are investigated to be 680,000 line/s for 1024-OCT and 320,000 line/s for 2048-OCT, which correspond to 1GByte processing bandwidth. In our experiment, a 2048-pixel CMOS camera running up to 70 kHz is used as an acquisition device. Therefore the actual imaging speed is camera-limited to 128,000 line/s for 1024-OCT or 70,000 line/s for 2048-OCT. 3D Data sets are continuously acquired in real time at 1024-OCT mode, immediately processed and visualized as high as 10 volumes/second (12,500 A-scans/volume) by either en face slice extraction or ray-casting based volume rendering from 3D texture mapped in graphics memory. For standard FD-OCT systems, a GPU is the only additional hardware needed to realize this improvement and no optical modification is needed. This technique is highly cost-effective and can be easily integrated into most ultrahigh speed FD-OCT systems to overcome the 3D data processing and visualization bottlenecks.