OCT technology transfer and the OCT market

Abstract

The field of optical coherence tomography (OCT) has blossomed dramatically since the first studies by various researchers around the world began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since then cumulatively, there have been dozens of companies created, over a hundred research groups working on or with OCT, over a thousand OCT patents issued, over 10,000 research articles published, tens of millions of patients scanned with OCT, hundreds of millions of venture capital and corporate R &D dollars invested, hundreds of millions of dollars in company acquisitions, and over a billion of dollars of OCT system revenue. This chapter will describe some of the history and factors involved in OCT technology transfer and commercialization, give a snapshot of the current OCT market, and speculate on some future OCT issues.