The push for high-speed, high-resolution OCT

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is already indispensable in ophthalmology, but its utility will grow further with improvements in resolution and speed. Work in these areas is underway by a number of research groups, as was evident at the recent OCT symposium at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). There, for instance, Axsun Technologies presented a poster on the impact of swept-source lasers with high tuning rate and broad tuning bandwidth for high-performance clinical systems. And OCT pioneer James Fujimoto emphasized speed in his presentation, which echoed the work presented in an article he co-authored for BioOptics World: Improved OCT imaging with VCSEL technology. A second piece in the same issue describes another approach to speedy OCT, with researchers at the University of Washington discussing an improvement to spectral-domain (SD-OCT) technology.

For even more on the topic of fast OCT, see "The multi-megahertz approach to optical coherence tomography" by researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians University (Munich, Germany), and Laser Focus World’s recent article, "OCT advances into clinical applications" by researchers at the University of California-Irvine.

The effect of all this work will be not only an expansion of OCT’s usefulness, but surely also greater adoption of OCT for such applications as endoscopy, dermatology, and dentistry.