Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) for Healthcare & Life science Market

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a well established technology within the ophthalmology medical imaging market. The ophthalmology OCT market, despite the saturation in developed countries, the OCT market for healthcare and life science is expected to grow. Strong demand from new biomedical applications, continuous development of innovative technologies, strong demand from developing countries such as countries from APAC region, will drive the OCT market growth.

OCT addresses global public health issues such as non-melanoma skin cancer, diabetic retinopathy, age-related Macular Disease, cardiovascular disease, barett’s esophagus, prostate cancer, etc. It is expected to reach medical applications outside ophthalmology which includes lifesciences sector. There is a huge need for label-free, non-invasive, in vivo imaging techniques for the diagnosis and monitoring of these pathologies that OCT can answer. Moreover the demand from developing countries such as China or India for medical equipment is seeing huge potential.

To support the shift towards new applications, the development of innovative technologies is necessary. Several functional OCT methods such as polarization sensitive OCT, Doppler OCT or OCT combined with fluorescence are being investigated to provide quantitative information and improve the diagnosis performance. Moreover, R&D efforts seek to develop the performance and compactness of components and sub-systems for OCT. The trend goes towards miniaturization with the use of PIC (Photonic Integrated Circuits). The aim is to enable the manufacturing of compact, low cost and portable OCT systems to reach applications at basic level such as the dermatologist, dentistry for example.