DSP technology and methods for OCT

Medical imaging devices are continually changing and evolving. In recent years, these devices have been evolving towards portable and handheld point-of-care systems. Innovations in the semiconductor technologies have been a major driving factor for such evolution. Today, optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems are mostly cart-based or desktop systems. Portable and hand-held OCT systems will open up new opportunities for their use. Recent advances in optics and scanning techniques have led to miniaturization of the optics used to acquire the raw data and at the same time, allow very high data acquisition rate. The signal processing chain to convert this raw acquired data into useful structural images is computationally intensive. The semiconductor industry, however, has a class of embedded processor technologies, known as digital signal processors (DSP), designed to take on such computations with very low power and size. DSP technology is a crucial enabler to create low power, low cost, handheld and portable OCT systems.