Real-time display on Fourier domain optical coherence tomography system using a graphics processing unit

Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) requires resampling of spectrally resolved depth information from wavelength to wave number, and the subsequent application of the inverse Fourier transform. The display rates of OCT images are much slower than the image acquisition rates due to processing speed limitations on most computers. We demonstrate a real-time display of processed OCT images using a linear-in-wave-number (linear-k) spectrometer and a graphics processing unit (GPU). We use the linear-k spectrometer with the combination of a diffractive grating with 1200 lines/mm and a F2 equilateral prism in the 840-nm spectral region to avoid calculating the resampling process. The calculations of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) are accelerated by the GPU with many stream processors, which realizes highly parallel processing. A display rate of 27.9 frames/sec for processed images (2048 FFT size x 1000 lateral A-scans) is achieved in our OCT system using a line scan CCD camera operated at 27.9 kHz.