May 3, 2007 - Researchers will introduce a new type of laser designed for providing high-resolution 3-D images of the retina, the part of the eye that converts light to electrical signals that travel to the brain, at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) and the Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference (QELS) in Baltimore, May 6-11.
Researchers have reported retinal scans at record speeds of up to 236,000 lines per second, improving by a factor of 10 over current OCT technology. Their technique uses a frequency-tunable laser to achieve fast scan speeds that can obtain a 3-D retinal image consisting of 512x512x400 volume elements of data in a human subject, in just 0.87 seconds.
Conventional OCT imaging usually yields a series of 2-D cross-sectional images of the retina, which can be combined to form a 3-D image of its volume. An improvement for diagnosing diseases would be to obtain very-high-resolution 3-D views of the eye.
March 31, 2026 
