James Fujimoto honored for OCT development

The team led by SPIE Fellow James Fujimoto (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was awarded the 2011 Carl Zeiss Research Award earlier this month for the development of optical coherence tomography (OCT), an eye examination method in which light rays are used in a similar fashion to sound waves in an ultrasound.

First published in 1991, OCT has become part of standard equipment used in screening tests for glaucoma and diabetes-related macular degeneration, and can also be used for biopsies, histology and functional brain images. The method uses light rays with a low coherence length which generate a special interference pattern that contains information on the examined specimen.

Fujimoto is chair of the BiOS symposium at SPIE Photonics West, and the author of two papers and instructor of a short course on optical coherence tomography to be presented at the event. He is an author of more than 130 conference proceedings and numerous Journal of Biomedical Optics articles in the SPIE Digital Library.

Read the press release from Carl Zeiss.