Near Video-Rate Optical Coherence Elastography by Acceleration With a Graphics Processing Unit

We present a graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated optical coherence elastography (OCE) system capable of generating strain images (elastograms) of soft tissue at near video-rates. The system implements phase-sensitive compression OCE using a pipeline of GPU kernel functions to enable a highly parallel implementation of OCE processing using the OpenCL framework. Developed on a commercial-grade GPU and desktop computer, the system achieves a processing rate of 21 elastograms per second at an image size of 960 × 400 pixels, enabling high-rate visualization during acquisition. The system is demonstrated on both tissue-simulating phantoms and fresh ex vivo mouse muscle. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation of near video-rate OCE and the fastest reported OCE processing rate, enabling, for the first time, a system capable of computing and displaying OCE elastograms interactively during acquisition. This advance provides new opportunities for medical imaging of soft tissue stiffness using optical methods.