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OCT design overview

Audience: advanced users and maintainers who need a detailed view of the distributed OCT pipeline. For a high-level introduction to OpticStream and its components, see the project overview and architecture pages.

Overview

This document describes the design of a distributed, event-driven data acquisition and real-time processing system for Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) data. The system uses Prefect as the workflow orchestration engine and supports scalable, fault-tolerant processing across tiles, mosaics, slices, and whole datasets.

The primary goals of the system are:

  • Efficient ingestion and integrity validation of raw OCT data
  • Near–real-time processing with minimal redundant I/O
  • Clear separation of processing stages with event-based coordination
  • Scalable execution across heterogeneous compute hosts
  • Transparent progress monitoring, QC reporting, and data publication