Drivers of the OCT market growth in clinical applications

摘要

The development of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) systems started in the 1990's. The technology early found its application in Ophthalmology. Today more than 75% of the OCT market comes from the ophthalmic sector. However the growth of the ophthalmology OCT market has been slowing down for the last years. In this article, we present the results of our prospective study on the drivers of the OCT market growth in the coming years, based on bibliographical research and interviews with key players. In parallel of being used for ophthalmology, OCT has been developed and tested in new medical domains like cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, etc. OCT addresses key societal challenges such as the diagnosis of coronary artery diseases or skin cancer. There is a strong demand for fast, high-resolution, label-free and in vivo imaging tools in these fields. For the last 5 years, R&D efforts have been focused on improving the performance and the compactness of OCT components and sub-systems. Advances in integrated photonics will enable the miniaturization of components and sub-systems and thus pave the way to Point-of-Care applications. Moreover the developments of new functionalities of OCT systems are undertaken to reach more complex diagnosis. OCT will no longer be a simple imaging device, it is on the verge of becoming a quantitative measurement tool. Our study shows that the emergence of new applications along with the improvements of components performance and the progress of functional OCT will drive the OCT market growth in the coming years.