I-Corps: Ultrahigh Speed Optical Coherence Tomography

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Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging nondestructive imaging technology that enables micron scale, cross sectional, and three-dimensional (3D) imaging of specimens. OCT has been used in a wide range of clinical applications, including ophthalmology, endoscopy, cardiology, urology, dermatology, and dentistry, as well as industrial applications such as nondestructive testing of materials, industrial inspection, and quality control in the production process. Speed, resolution, and accuracy define innovation in the OCT market. Development and commercialization of innovative high-performance OCT technologies will help greatly improve procedure efficiency, diagnostic accuracy, and patient comfort, and will embody a significant competitive advantage in the highly competitive, nearly $1B OCT device market.This I-Corps team developed a space-division multiplexing OCT (SDM-OCT) technology, which utilizes a parallel imaging approach to achieve over a 10-fold speed improvement compared to state of the art commercial OCT systems. This technology can be inexpensively implemented in the next generation of OCT devices, i.e., new customers, as well as potentially be retrofitted into existing OCT devices that represents a huge existing customer base. In this I-Corps program, the team will further optimize the SDM-OCT technology, identify customer needs from end users, collect feedback from OCT manufactures, and develop an informed commercialization strategies based on insights obtained through customer discovery. These will enable the team to expedite the translation of the SDM-OCT technology from the laboratory to the market in order to make a positive impact in many fields of clinical and industrial OCT applications