Fourier-Domain OCT Imaging Processor with Improved Memory Efficiency

This paper presents a display processing unit for the image formation of the Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography (FDOCT) system. Using the proposed design, the FDOCT imaging operations involving the re-sampler, the real-valued fast Fourier transform (RFFT) and the image display processing can be efficiently performed using a hardware processor, allowing high-frame-rate OCT image display with the direct generation of gray-scale image data. Compared to previous works, the proposed design improved the memory efficiency in terms of the RAM size, the control complexity and the logarithm table size for the re-sampler, the RFFT and the display processing units, respectively. The presented FDOCT imaging processor was verified using a SoC-FPGA platform based on the software-hardware codesign with accesses of the raw data obtained from the FDOCT front-end equipment.