Colloquium: Thomas Milner - Optics for Medical Diagnostics and Surgery

Although for millennia the development of optical science and engineering has been intimately interconnected with the human eye, over the last few decades light has been increasingly used to image and treat pathologies in many other tissues. These recent medical developments and innovations have been enabled in part by availability of extraordinary bright laser sources that are applied to mitigate effects of strong light scattering and absorption in tissue. The application of broadband fiber-optic interferometry also known as optical coherence tomography (OCT) is routinely utilized by medical physicians and researchers for imaging to traverse the strong scattering properties of most tissues. State-of-the art diagnostic applications of OCT for imaging diseased human coronary arteries and neural pathologies in the eye are presented. Advantages of the application of OCT to guide laser surgeries that utilize ablation for tissue cutting or photothermolysis for coagulation are highlighted. A novel application of image-guided laser surgery for surgical removal of brain tumors in an animal model is presented.