Some of my more recent work has involved using an OCT system sold by Thor Labs. This system has a good user interface for taking 3D scans of objects up to 4×4 in dimensions up to a depth of 1.6mm however, the system provides little to no data process and very few options for exporting the data for use with other programs. So in order that this system could be used by other groups without each developing their own data analysis software, I made a simple Labview program that reads the Thor Labs .RAW files and displays them in several ways for further data processing.

The .RAW file is a 4D data file that records the light intensity at a position in 3D space for each one of the points within a scan. My OCT .RAW reader program decodes the points from the .RAW file and then displays slices from this data in the required orientation.

XYZ examples of slicing a 4D dataset

XYZ examples of slicing a 4D dataset

The program also allows for some de-noising and is built so that a user can simply add their own form of data correction into the code if required.

The software then allows this data to be exported in one of two ways – as a series of text files (each file is one slice) or a series of seize corrected JPEG slice images. The JPEG files can then be further processed into complex 3D volume images using the excellent jImage.

Rotating stalk

The program is designed to allow the data-input section to be changeable for other OCT system files. You can either do this yourself using the Labview vi’s I’ve provided or if you don’t have the expertise or the time, then I am always happy to add more features to the software so just send me a data file and I’ll sort it out best I can.

Release notes

This has been tested on a few systems and seems pretty stable. Due to the limits of Labview it does struggle with .RAW files over 250MB. This software was developed independently and not endorsed in any form by Thor Labs.

3 Comments

Francis · 2 June 2014 at 15:18

Please, can you help me to download your project? The link to “Thor labs OCT .RAW reader” seems not working
‘The content you are looking for could not be found.’

Thank you

    Matthew (@MCeeP) · 2 June 2014 at 17:33

    Looking into it, should have it fixed shortly, I’ll let you know

      hatef · 17 April 2016 at 00:18

      the file with name of load raw is missing

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