New affordable OCT scanner could soon be on the market

Researchers at Duke University, North Carolina, have designed an affordable portable optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanner that weighs under 2kgs as opposed to the current commercial machines that weigh over 27kg. Whilst traditional OTC devices cost somewhere between $50k and $120k, this one is expected to cost less than $15k.
The first clinical trial of the new OCT scanner produced images of 120 retinas that were allegedly 95% as sharp as those taken by current commercial machines. A new study has been undertaken at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, in which the new OCT scanner was tested against a commercial instrument by performing clinical imaging on both eyes of 60 patients, half from healthy volunteers and half with some sort of retinal disease. Contrast-to-noise ratio was used to make the image comparison, and the results demonstrated that the more affordable OCT scanner provided useful contrast that was remarkably just 5.6% less than that of the commercial machine.
Adam Wax, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, said: “The key to preventing blindness is early detection. Our goal is to make OCT drastically less expensive so more clinics can afford the devices, especially in global health settings….Right now OCT devices sit in their own room and require a PhD scientist to tweak them to get everything working just right. Ours can just sit on a shelf in the office and be taken down, used and put back without problems. We’ve scanned people in a Starbucks with it.”