Interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy implementation on a floating point multi-core digital signal processer

Abstract

The transition of optical coherence tomography (OCT) technology from the lab environment towards the more challenging clinical and point-of-care settings is continuing at a rapid pace. On one hand this translation opens new opportunities and avenues for growth, while on the other hand it also presents a new set of challenges and constraints under which OCT systems have to operate. OCT systems in the clinical environment are not only required to be user friendly and easy to operate, but should also be portable, have a smaller form factor coupled with low cost and reduced power consumption. Digital signal processors (DSP) are in a unique position to satisfy the computational requirements for OCT at a much lower cost and power consumption compared to the existing platforms such as CPU and graphics processing units (GPUs). In this work, we describe the implementation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) and interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM) processing on a floating point multi-core DSP (C6678, Texas Instruments). ISAM is a computationally intensive data processing technique that is based on the re-sampling of the Fourier space of the data to yield spatially invariant transverse resolution in OCT. Preliminary results indicate that 2DISAM processing at 70,000 A-lines/sec and OCT at 180,000 A-lines/sec can be achieved with the current implementation using available DSP hardware.