Optical coherence tomography: Current biomedical applications and future clinical utility

Clinicians are faced with an ever-increasing plethora of choices for the early detection of life-threatening medical conditions, such as heart disease or cancer. Many of these pathologies require invasive biopsy procedures to verify the presence and stage of disease progression. Once identified the patient must then undergo treatment, where current imaging techniques lack the resolution for treatment monitoring that can be correlated to the gold standard of disease-free survival, namely histology. Optical coherence tomography is an exciting, high-resolution (~10μm) non-invasive, imaging modality that may provide solutions to these problems and aid in the early detection and treatment monitoring of diseases. As the technology matures there is great potential for optical coherence tomography to become a clinical tool to aid in the clinical decision making process in an effort to properly provide patient risk stratification and subsequent appropriate therapy. In this article we present potential solutions to existing technical hurdles and speculate on future clinical implementation.