Real-time 3D and 4D Fourier domain Doppler optical coherence tomography based on dual graphics processing units

We present real-time 3D (2D cross-sectional image plus time) and 4D (3D volume plus time) phase-resolved Doppler OCT (PRDOCT) imaging based on configuration of dual graphics processing units (GPU). A GPU-accelerated phase-resolving processing algorithm was developed and implemented. We combined a structural image intensity-based thresholding mask and average window method to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the Doppler phase image. A 2D simultaneous display of the structure and Doppler flow images was presented at a frame rate of 70 fps with an image size of 1000 × 1024 (X × Z) pixels. A 3D volume rendering of tissue structure and flow images—each with a size of 512 × 512 pixels—was presented 64.9 milliseconds after every volume scanning cycle with a volume size of 500 × 256 × 512 (X × Y × Z) voxels, with an acquisition time window of only 3.7 seconds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that an online, simultaneous structure and Doppler flow volume visualization has been achieved. Maximum system processing speed was measured to be 249,000 A-scans per second with each A-scan size of 2048 pixels.