A BRIEF HISTORY OF OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY:
Optical coherence tomography is often described as the optical analog of ultrasound, generating images using the time delay and magnitude of light echoes. In fact, OCT had its origins in femtosecond optics.
History of OCT at New England Eye Center
“OCT was developed through a collaborative effort between New England Eye Center (NEEC) of Tufts University School of Medicine, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and Lincoln Laboratory at MIT. The technology was developed by James Fujimoto’s laboratory at MIT in 1991. The first time a patient was imaged with OCT outside of the laboratory took place at NEEC at Tufts Medical Center in 1994. By 1996, the first commercially available device was developed by Carl Zeiss Meditec, Inc.”u
STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY:
“It is an extension of a technique called low-coherence interferometry, which was initially applied to ophthalmology for in vivo measurements of eye axial length.”
“The first clinical system was limited to a scanning speed of 400 axial scans (A-scans)/s because of a physical constraint: a moving reference mirror. “
PIONEERS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY:
The concept of using echoes of light to see inside biological tissue was proposed more than 40 years ago by Michel Duguay at AT&T Bell Laboratories.1
Adolf Friedrich Fercher – his most important work was certainly the introduction of partial coherence interferometry (PCI) as a tool for optical biometry of tissue and as a cornerstone of optical coherence tomography (OCT).
REFERENCES:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4968928/
https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/355854
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4968928/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3088542/
piedigitallibrary.org/journals/journal-of-biomedical-optics/volume-22/issue-12/121704/Adolf-Friedrich-Fercher-a-pioneer-of-biomedical-optics/10.1117/1.JBO.22.12.121704.full?SSO=1
https://www.opticianonline.net/cet-archive/4601
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/opti.2017.7.6355?journalCode=opti