February 2016 NUI Galway Research Features At Global Photonics Conference in San Francisco

Compact Imaging and NUI Galway presentations at US Photonics Conference highlight the dramatic size and cost reductions made possible by MRO™ OCT Technology

Researchers and technologists from Compact Imaging, Inc. (CI) and their research collaboration partner NUI Galway, who together are developing miniature optical sensors that noninvasively image and measure subsurface characteristics of human tissue, had featured roles at last week’s (13-18 February) annual SPIE/Photonics West Conference, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

SPIE/Photonics West is the world’s premier photonics and bio-photonics industry conference. The Conference, which is attended by scientists and industry executives from more than three dozen countries, consists of plenary sessions, presentations and panels on the latest research and developments in optics, photonics and bio-photonics.

Martin Leahy, Professor of Applied Physics at the School of Physics in NUI Galway, and a key advisor to Compact Imaging, served as a Conference Chair and presented a significant paper on Compact Imaging’s innovative OCT technology, MRO™ (Multiple Reference OCT), titled, “The How and Why of a $10 Optical Coherence Tomography System.”

Professor Leahy’s talk contrasted Compact Imaging’s small low-cost MRO system with conventional clinical OCT machines. When fully integrated, MRO sensors will be about the size of a quarter, fit easily inside a mobile device and cost less than $10 to produce. Although the clinic-scale OCT instruments have revolutionised medical diagnostic imaging and are expected to remain a vital diagnostic tool for medical professionals, they are large, expensive, complex and power hungry - far from mobile at a time when personalisation is a dominant trend in healthcare.

Because Compact Imaging’s MRO architecture was developed to leverage mass-produced miniature components commonly found in consumer electronic devices, it is well-suited to integration in high volume devices for applications ranging from personal health monitoring to secure identity authentication.

Compact Imaging founder Dr Josh Hogan also participated in the conference. Additional talks were given on various aspects of MRO research and development by post-doctoral researchers and graduate students in Professor Leahy’s Tissue Optics and Microcirculation Imaging (TOMI) laboratories at NUI Galway.

Professor Martin Leahy from NUI Galway said: “OCT has had an enormous impact on healthcare, first on eye and now in the coronary artery diseases. With Compact Imaging, we want to extend the impact of OCT to communities and to the six billion people outside of the first world, who will simply never access the benefits of OCT in its current format.”

Don Bogue, CEO of Compact Imaging said: “In the field of OCT imaging and biometry, size, price and operating power are three critical elements to commercialisation in mass market applications. Our MRO system is the first version of OCT with the size, cost and operating power profile to address high volume applications in areas such as mobile personal health monitoring and biometric security.”

Compact Imaging’s intellectual property base, consisting of 15 US patents and an equal number of pending US and foreign applications, is centered on MRO™ and its use in a wide range of biological and non-biological imaging and biometry applications.

ENDS