Ultra-high speed real-time 4D display system installed in ultra-high speed parallel OCT system at a volume rate of 12 volumes/sec

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become a promising diagnostic method in many medical fields. Non-invasive real-time optical biopsy of internal organs is one of the most attractive applications of OCT enabling in-situ diagnostic of cancer in its early stage, i.e. optical biopsy. For the application, faster OCT methods are required to reduce the inspection time and motion artifacts in images. A criterion to satisfy the purpose is an endoscopic-OCT method capable to display volumetric tomography continuously in real-time at a rate of video movie like conventional endoscopes. In our previous work, we demonstrated ultra-high speed OCT at an A-scan rate of 60 MHz. However, movies were rendered after the data acquisition. In this work, we have developed an ultra-fast data processing system, installed it in the ultra-high speed OCT system, and enabled real time display of various 3D tomography images without limitation of diagnostic time, i.e. 4D OCT imaging, at an A-scan rate, B-scan rate and volume rate of 10 MHz, 4 kHz and 12 volumes/sec, respectively. Various image presentations in real-time are demonstrated such as continuous rendered 3D imaging and continuous 2D-slice scanning 3D imaging.