Ultrawidefield OCT

Abstract

SummaryRetinal wide‐field imaging plays an increasingly important role for the diagnosis of various types or pathologies, some of which start or prevalently appear in the periphery. Despite the great value of wide field fundus cameras and scanning laser ophthalmoscopes for diagnosis and documentation, these devices only acquire 2‐dimensional data in form of en face projections. However, cross‐sectional imaging with optical coherence tomography (OCT) can provide a wealth of additional information. To cover a wide area of the retina of 100° or more of viewing angle, 5 – 10 million OCT scans are required. Current commercially available OCT technology is not able to capture such large data sets and the acquisition time would be prohibitively long.We recently developed retinal Megahertz OCT (MHz‐OCT), an OCT system that can acquire more than 1 million depth scans per second. It can achieve the high speed by using a new type of swept laser source: the Fourier Domain Mode Locked (FDML) laser. This high speed enables us to acquire a densely sampled 3‐dimensional OCT data set in the non‐mydriatic eye, covering an area of up to 100° angle on the human retina. Technology development and diagnostic potential of such devices will be discussed.