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OCT ready to go mainstream
My colleague Susan Curtis was also in San Jose this week pulling together a dedicated blog on Photonics West for her website optics.org. Susan’s report from Monday’s Laser and Marketplace Seminar follows.
In a year when steady single-digit growth is the norm in the optics/photonics industry, any sector expanding by more than 30% year-on-year demands close attention. According to Greg Smolka, a consultant with 20 years experience in the photonics industry behind him, the market for optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems is benefiting from new technology that is enabling more companies to enter the market.
In his talk at Monday’s Lasers and Photonics Marketplace Seminar, Smolka pointed out that until 2006 the only player in the OCT market was Carl Zeiss, which introduced its first time-domain OCT system for ophthalmic imaging applications in 1996. Crucially, this first-generation technology was by covered a patent that prevented other players from launching competing products.
More recently, the introduction of Fourier-domain OCT has fundamentally altered the competitive landscape. This technology improves both the accuracy and definition of images, and also increases scan speeds by a factor of 50-100. What’s more, it’s not covered by the original patent.
As a result, around 19 companies have launched commercial Fourier-domain OCT products, and in so doing have extended the technique’s capabilities from ophthalmology to other biomedical applications such as dentistry and cardiovascular imaging. According to Smolka, this will enable the OCT market to grow by 33.5% year-on-year, increasing from just less than $200 million in 2007 to $800 million in 2012.
What’s more, Smolka says that developers of OCT systems are typically focused on end applications, and are looking for technology partners to develop and supply the specialist optical components (e.g. superluminescent diodes, lasers, CCD or CMOS image sensors, galvanometers and fibre-optic probes). One consequence, he says, will be an increase in the number of start-ups bringing new products to market, as well as significant merger and acquisition activity.
