Feature
OSA Centennial Snapshots: OCT and the Flowering of Biophotonics
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, government funding and interdisciplinary innovation combined to launch optical coherence tomography—a milestone in biomedical optics.
The first OCT image of the retina, published in 1991. The two-dimensional image, or “B-scan,” is created by combining around 100 axial or A-scans that provide a depth profile of reflections at each horizontal point. [Fom Huang et al., Science, doi: 10.1126/science.1957169. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.]
Twenty-five years ago this month, the editors of Science accepted for publication a research paper titled “Optical Coherence Tomography.” That three-word phrase (and its punchier abbreviation, OCT) heralded a revolution in ophthalmology—one that would spawn a billion-dollar-a-year market, and affect millions of people.
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