NWO grant to develop super-speed OCT technique for new applications

Lyuba Amitonova (ARCNL and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and researcher Dierck Hillmann (VU) receive funding from NWO for their joint research project ‘Super-Speed Swept-Source Full-Field Optical Coherence Tomography’. The project is granted in the Open Competition Domain Science-M program and consists of 833.000 euro.  

Optical coherence tomography advancement

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging technique used primarily for diagnostics of eye diseases and to characterize the morphology and function of retinal tissue in living humans. An important feature of OCT is its acquisition speed – faster acquisition provides clearer images, and more information can be extracted from the data.  

When asked about the research plans, Lyuba answers:

“We aim to develop new methods to significantly increase the imaging speed of full-field OCT. Our technology will revolutionize the field by enabling OCT at unprecedented acquisition rates, enabling phase-stable data acquisition and thereby making the phase usable as an additional contrast mechanism, e.g., to observe the function of cells in the living retina.”

The researchers expect this will pave the way for new applications of OCT in many fields from fundamental research to medical diagnostics, including the early detection and monitoring of eye diseases and neurological disorders. 

Complementary expertise

With Lyuba and Dierck onboard, the project leverages complementary expertise. Lyuba has extensive experience in computational optical imaging and compressive sensing using a randomly structured illumination and sparsity-based reconstruction. Dierck is an expert in OCT, particularly in full-field Fourier-domain OCT and its application for functional imaging of the retina. 

Are you interested in reading more about biological applications of the research in Lyuba’s research group?