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Puliafito receives award for invention, development of OCT
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Carmen A. Puliafito, MD, MBA, OSN Retina/Vitreous Section Editor and dean of the Keck School of Medicine of USC, received the 2012 António Champalimaud Vision Award for the invention and development of optical coherence tomography.
The award was presented during a ceremony held at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal. Puliafito will share half of the award’s €1 million ($1.26 million) prize with research team members James G. Fujimoto, PhD; David Huang, MD, PhD; OSN Glaucoma Board Member Joel S. Schuman, MD, FACS; and Eric A. Swanson, MS. The other half of the prize will be shared by researchers led by David R. Williams, PhD, who were honored for the development of adaptive optics.
“Both discoveries offer noninvasive methods to obtain high-resolution images of the retina that have drastically changed ophthalmic practice and hold great potential to advance both new research and clinical care,” the Champalimaud Foundation said in a press release from the Keck School of Medicine.
Puliafito’s research team initially worked on OCT at MIT, and they published their invention in Science in 1991. By the mid-1990s, they developed the first OCT instrument for clinical ophthalmology, according to the release.
“I can think of no other clinical development in the last half century that has had as important and large an impact on the practice of ophthalmology as has this technology,” Morton F. Goldberg, MD, director emeritus of the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins, said in nomination of the award.