High Speed Data Acquisition System for Optical Coherence Tomography

Data acquisition systems currently utilized for optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging have limited data acquisition rates that hinder high speed systems such as the clinical OCT system. Recently, advances in OCT technology have enabled the imaging of the tissue functional state in addition to the imaging of tissue microstructure. These functional imaging techniques such as Doppler OCT and Spectroscopic OCT require the digitization of the full interferometric fringe pattern instead of digitizing just the demodulated fringe pattern envelopes. Because the current data acquisition rates are not sufficient to acauire the full fringe pattern, the development of a high-speed data acquisition system for OCT signal measurement is required to study Doppler and Spectroscopic OCT effects. In this project, we propose to develop a PCbased high-speed data acquisition system that is capable of being used in a variety of OCT systems and a number of OCT delivery devices. The development of this high-speed data acquisition system will enable a number of OCT projects, in both clinical and laboratory settings, to be investigated. Thesis supervisor: Professor James G. Fujimoto Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science