High-speed optical coherence tomography signal processing on GPU

The signal processing speed of spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) has become a bottleneck in many medical applications. Recently, a time-domain interpolation method was proposed. This method not only gets a better signal-to noise ratio (SNR) but also gets a faster signal processing time for the SD-OCT than the widely used zero-padding interpolation method. Furthermore, the re-sampled data is obtained by convoluting the acquired data and the coefficients in time domain. Thus, a lot of interpolations can be performed concurrently. So, this interpolation method is suitable for parallel computing. An ultra-high optical coherence tomography signal processing can be realized by using graphics processing unit (GPU) with computer unified device architecture (CUDA). This paper will introduce the signal processing steps of SD-OCT on GPU. An experiment is performed to acquire a frame SD-OCT data (400A-linesx2048 pixel per A-line) and real-time processed the data on GPU. The results show that it can be finished in 6.208 milliseconds, which is 37 times faster than that on Central Processing Unit (CPU).