ARVO 2023: The value of holographic optical coherence tomography (OCT) and continued imaging research

Dierck Hillmann, PhD, was interviewed by our onsite team at the 2023 ARVO annual meeting where he shared research on holographic optical coherence tomography (OCT).

Video transcript

Editor’s note: Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Dierck Hillmann, PhD:

My name is Dierck Hillmann. I'm from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and we've been doing research on holographic OCT, and the research is actually done at the, was done, at the University of Lubeck, together with Hendrik Spahr, Gereon Hüttmann, and then other people who've been involved were Clara Pfäffle, Léo Puyo, and Jonas Franke. And with holographic OCT, we have the advantage that we sort of can use the phase of optical coherence tomography for correcting imaging errors of the eye, and also for functional contrast, or for looking at hemodynamics in the retina.

One thing that we're working on now or that's going to be worked on at the University of Lubeck is actually combining that with clinically available systems to bring this technology into the clinics, sort of using a point scanning OCT system to eventually get all these advantages that we showed originally with a experimental high speed system. Well, on a clinical setting, actually.

Eventually in the clinics, this could mean that there's going to be better resolution, that there's the ability to do functional imaging sort of to find out whether cells are working or not just whether cells are there or that the morphology is correctly but even getting the functional state of the retina, having an impact on early diagnostics, [and] on therapy control.