Inventor speaks about history, development of OCT technology

PARIS — Optical coherence tomography has become an invaluable instrument in clinical practice. Dramatic advances have been seen in this technology in the past few years, new developments will be seen in the near future and applications are constantly widening, but its takeoff was rather slow in ophthalmology, according to James G. Fujimoto, PhD, the MIT professor who invented and developed the technology.

"OCT was developed in the early '90s, and it took more than 10 years before it became clinically accepted with the third-generation technology, the Zeiss Stratus," he said in a lecture at the meeting of the French Society of Ophthalmology.

"It is very exciting now because more than seven companies have introduced OCT into the ophthalmic market," he said.

The development of Fourier/spectral domain detection improved imaging speed, which is now 50 times higher than in previous OCT technology. Resolution has improved, and 3-D rendering, imaging of selected layers and segmented 3-D images are now possible.

"With these improved capabilities and the different instruments that are now in the market, we are in the position to perform very exciting clinical studies. We can look at the structure of the retina and optic nerve layers much more accurately, reducing the measurement variance, which should improve the ability to track disease progression, and the changes, even very small changes, induced by therapies," Dr. Fujimoto said.

In chronic diseases with a long progression, such as glaucoma or dry age-related macular degeneration, the ability to do sensitive measurements is "very exciting," he said.

"Both for the pharmaceutical companies, because they will be able to shorten the drug development cycle, and, ultimately, for the clinicians, who will be able to assess very accurately and closely the response to therapy, and modify it if necessary," he said.