Inventor recalls eye imaging breakthrough

Inventor recalls eye imaging breakthrough David Huang ’85, SM ’89, PhD ’93 If you’ve been to an eye doctor and had an image taken of the inside of your eye, chances are good it was done with optical coherence tomography (OCT)—a technology invented by clinician-scientist David Huang ’85, SM ’89, PhD ’93, and now used in 40 million procedures per year. OCT is a noninvasive technique used to produce detailed images of complicated biological tissues such as the retina and the plaques that can build up in coronary arteries. It maps the time-of-flight of light waves reflected from tissue and paints a high-resolution picture of internal structures. “It uses infrared light that’s barely visible compared to the bright flash of fundus photography [another common method of eye imaging] and provides a lot more information—three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional information—at higher resolution,”…