Optical coherence tomography with online visualization of more than seven rendered volumes per second

Nearly real-time visualization of 3-D volumes is crucial for the use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) during microsurgery. With an ultrahigh speed spectral domain OCT coupled to a surgical microscope, on-line display of 7.2 rendered volumes at $87megapixels$ per second is demonstrated. Calculating the A-scans from the spectra is done on a quad-core personal computer (PC), while dedicated software for the 3-D rendering is executed on a high performance video card. Imaging speed is practically only limited by the readout of the camera. First experiments show the feasibility of real-time 3-D OCT for guided interventions.