27.06.2025 He changed how we look into the eye – and not only that. Prof. David Huang, co-creator of OCT optical tomography, visited Warsaw and the ICTER headquarters for the first time. The visit of the outstanding scientist, awarded, among others, the Lasker Award and the National Medal of Technology, became not only a symbolic clasp fastening together over 30 years of development of OCT technology, but also an inspiration for subsequent generations of researchers.
On June 20, 2025, Prof. David Huang – a world-famous ophthalmologist, biomedical engineer, and professor at Oregon Health & Science University – lectured at the ICTER headquarters entitled “Optical Coherence Tomography: Seeing Small & Aiming Big”. It was not only a synthetic summary of thirty years of development of OCT technology, but also a personal story about how OCT, from a “solution without a problem”, became the foundation of modern eye diagnostics – and not only.
Professor Huang, who developed the first version of OCT in 1991 in the laboratory of Prof. James Fujimoto at MIT, emphasized during his speech:
OCT is an example of how basic science can find millions of applications in medicine. We used to be asked what it would actually be useful for. Today, in the USA alone, over 2.5 million intravitreal injections are performed per year, largely monitored thanks to OCT.
Eye-opening seminar and symbolic visit to the laboratory
Optical tomography OCT technology uses infrared light to create three-dimensional, microscopic tissue cross-sections, without the need for surgical intervention. This enables, among other things, precise diagnostics and monitoring of retinal diseases, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, or macular degeneration (AMD). However, its applications today reach much further – from cardiology, through oncology, to neurology.
After the seminar, Prof. Huang visited the ICTER laboratories, where he learned about ongoing projects, including work on new modifications of OCT and research in the field of computational genomics and eye biology. Even though the meeting took place on the long weekend, Prof. Huang found time to talk to almost every ICTER researcher.
Prof. Maciej Wojtkowski, director of ICTER and one of the pioneers of developing OCT technologies in Europe, was delighted that visit:
Prof. Huang’s visit to our institute is an honor and an important moment for us. This is a meeting with a person whose work inspired much of what we do today at ICTER. His contribution to the development of OCT goes beyond the field of imaging – it is an example of how science can change the lives of millions of patients.
Who is Prof. David Huang?
Prof. David Huang received his PhD in medicine and biomedical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School. His key achievement was the co-development of OCT technology, first described in 1991 in the journal Science. He currently leads the COOL Lab (Center for Ophthalmic Optics and Lasers) team at the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.
He has received prestigious awards for his achievements, including the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation – the highest technological distinction in the USA. He is the author of over 350 scientific publications and dozens of patents, and his works have been cited over 60 thousand times.
Thanks to researchers such as Prof. Huang, OCT has become not only a standard in ophthalmology but also a dynamically developing tool in research on the brain, heart, blood vessels, and other systems. His latest work focuses on, among others, optoretinography – non-invasive imaging of photoreceptor function – and AI applications in the analysis of microscopic inflammatory cells in eye diseases.
A visit by Prof. David Huang’s work at ICTER can be seen as a symbolic meeting of the source and the stream: from the first retinal scans in a small laboratory in 1990 to contemporary, advanced microscopic imaging conducted in Warsaw – with the same idea in the background: to “see more” and “understand deeper”.
