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In this Hot Topics presentation, Brett Bouma notes how diagnostic procedures using optical coherence tomography (OCT) technology have become the gold standard for detecting diseases of the eye, heart and gastrointestinal tract, looking for disease in the body -- without incisions.
Advances in endoscopic OCT have included a 20-fold increase in image speed, now producing 3,000 frames per second. Other advances include new probes such as tethered capsules, polarization sensitive imaging, and uses in biopsy guidance.
The technique has been in use since the 1990s in animals and in humans since 2002. But the clinical community was skeptical until studies in 2003 showed ways to obtain dramatically higher speed imaging of tissues over a wider field of view.
Brett Bouma is a professor of dermatology and health sciences and technology at Harvard Medical School and an associate physicist in the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). His doctoral research, at the University of Illinois, Chicago, focused on understanding the interaction of ultrafast laser pulses with optical materials and plasmas. Since starting a lab at MGH in 1998, he has focused his research on the development and clinical application of novel optical technologies for diagnosis and therapy.
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