(Vienna, 20 November 2019) Laurin Ginner, PhD student at MedUni Vienna’s Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering has been awarded the Ministry of Science Award of Excellence for his PhD thesis.
Advanced techniques for functional parallel optical coherence tomography
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a three-dimensional imaging technique widely used in ophthalmology. It is used to examine the retina and to assess retinal functionality and dynamics.
The aim of this thesis was to further develop parallelisation for OCT, thereby generating the associated high-speed images to provide detailed insights into retinal functionality and structure.
Parallelisation allows very high image-acquisition rates, thereby reducing motion artefacts during image capture. Two devices were developed for this purpose. The first device was capable of image rates of 2.5 kHz and this is sufficient to produce phase-stable measurements over the entire three-dimensional volume. The great advantage of a phase-stable image is that it allows the wave front to be defined. In this way, one obtains true image information including depth and location information. This can be used to analyse the wave front and make digital corrections for defocus or aberrations, for example. Moreover, phase-stable images of this kind allow the use of digital apertures to calculate angle-independent blood flow in the eye. The second system uses a novel technique allowing different layers of the retina to be selected and images to be taken at very high speed. This likewise allows the use of digital wave front correction and additional blood-flow calculations.
Parallel image-acquisition allows these digital techniques to be used with relatively little technological outlay, especially since the conventional route to these techniques is hardware-based and is very complex and expensive.
The Ministry of Education, Science and Research Award of Excellence has been awarded since 2008 to the 40 best doctoral graduates from the past academic year studying at universities of arts and sciences. The candidates are put forward by the universities.
About Laurin Ginner
Laurin Ginner did a bachelors degree in Technical Physics and then went on to do a Masters in Physical Energy and Measurement Technology at Vienna University of Technology.
At the beginning of 2015, he started a PhD (Medical Physics) at the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Innovative Optical Imaging and its Translation into Medicine" (OPTRAMED) under the supervision of Rainer A. Leitgeb at MedUni Vienna's Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering.
Service: Optica
Laurin Ginner, Abhishek Kumar, Daniel Fechtig, Lara M. Wurster, Matthias Salas, Michael Pircher, and Rainer A. Leitgeb, "Noniterative digital aberration correction for cellular resolution retinal optical coherence tomography in vivo," Optica 4, 924-931 (2017)
https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.4.000924