Description
Optovue RTVue OCT
The Optovue RTVue OCT system has an ultra-high-speed or high-resolution OCT retina scanner which enable the FD-OCT to visualize the retinal tissue with ultra-high clarity in a fraction of seconds.
It is based on the next generation Fourier-Domain Optical Coherence technology just emerging from clinical research in the last two years.
The old generation OCT, is based on the Time-Domain OCT technology. In TD-OCT, there is a mechanical moving part, which performs the A-scan, and the information along the longitudinal direction is accumulated over the course of the longitudinal scan time.
Due to the nature of the slow mechanical moving speed, the scan time in TD-OCT is very slow. For example, the current commercial retina scanner can only perform 400 A-scans/second. Because of the fast eye motion effect, it is not feasible to use TD-OCT to map the retina tissue.
Therefore, it is limited in ocular applications which mostly require high repeatability and high data sampling rate, which must be completed in a fraction of a second.
In Fourier-Domain OCT, the information in an entire A-scan is acquired by a CCD camera simultaneously. The A-scan acquisition rate is only limited by the CCD camera frame transfer rate and the computer calculation time to perform the Fourier transform of the CCD acquired raw data into A-scan information. Due to the fast CCD camera frame transfer rate and fast Fourier transform algorithm, FD-OCT, like RTVue, can perform 26,000 A-scan/second. This is a 65 times speed advancement over current technology.