A brief history of OCT technology

The story of OCT probably begins in 1971 with Professor Michel Duguay’s successful attempt to use femtosecond (10–15 seconds) optics to image ‘light in flight’.

Interestingly, at the time, Prof Duguay went as far as suggesting ‘seeing inside human tissue’ as a possible application of his research, an outcome that took some 20 years of R&D to bring to fruition.

Further foundations of the technology were presented in a 1986 paper by Fujimoto et al. using femtosecond optical ranging in biological tissue. Professors James Fujimoto and David Huang – who was a combined MD (ophthalmology), PhD graduate student at the time (see Huang et al, 1991) – are recognised as the fathers of ophthalmic OCT.