Add RSS FeedJames Fujimoto
Kathy Kincade
Back in the 1980s, when he was a graduate student in Erich Ippen’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, MA), James Fujimoto spent many of his days (and often late nights) studying the effects of ultrafast lasers on semiconductors and organic materials. Little did he know that his research would come to serve as the foundation for one of the most important developments in biomedical optics in the past two decades—optical coherence tomography (OCT).
“At the time, much of biomedical optics research was focused on laser-tissue interaction for surgical and therapeutic applications, tissue cutting, thermal effects, and so on,” Fujimoto says. “We had a background in femtosecond optics and we began looking at using femtosecond lasers to measure biological tissues.”
“Although the effects of these advances may take some time to be realized, you can have a real impact on society. If you are motivated by advancing scientific and clinical knowledge, and helping people, this is a very rewarding field.”
Early experiments focused high-intensity femtosecond lasers into transparent tissues. According to Fujimoto, his research quickly went from using femtosecond lasers to produce laser-tissue interactions to measuring structures in the eye. He and his colleagues began to realize that low-coherence interferometry offered an easier approach for measuring structures using echos of light, and they could do the same measurements using a compact superluminescent-diode light source instead of femtosecond lasers and achieve better sensitivity.
“David Huang, an MD/PhD student, was the first to recognize that if you have axial measurements of light echo delay, you could generate 2-D, cross-sectional images, similar to ultrasound,” Fujimoto says. “So we applied these ultrasound concepts to optical imaging. We decided on the name ‘optical coherence tomography’ because in tomographical imaging there is a whole class of measurement techniques that use coherence.”
The first published report of OCT appeared in Science in 1991.1 Their collaborator Carmen Puliafito, who was director of the New England Eye Center and chairman of ophthalmology at Tufts University School of Medicine, then pursued the idea of using OCT to image the retina.
“Carmen had a vision of how to apply these technologies,” Fujimoto says. “He is an outstanding clinician but also has business and marketing skills. Working with him really drove the technology into the clinical marketplace because he could talk to the clinical community in a way that really established the large-scale applications. For example, he had the idea of writing a book about how to interpret OCT images, which was very important for gaining acceptance in ophthalmology.”2
Thanks to his work with Huang, Puliafito, and other key developers of OCT, including Eric Swanson, Mark Brezinski, Brett Bouma, Stephen Boppart, and Joel Schuman, Fujimoto recognized early on that OCT imaging has many unique advantages for medical diagnostics and could translate into clinical tools that could change the standard of medical care. This led him to join forces again with Puliafito, Swanson, Brezinski, and others, to begin what turned out to be an almost bigger challenge than developing the technology in the first place: trying to bring it to market.
“We formed a start-up company (Advanced Ophthalmic Devices) but we quickly realized that it was going to take a long time to develop this technology and bring it to market,” he says. “So we pursued a strategy of developing a prototype and finding a buyer for the technology and the company.”
In the end, Zeiss acquired the technology and introduced the first commercial OCT system in 1996, for ophthalmology. Fujimoto says it took time before Zeiss began to see a return on its investment, selling only 100 units or so for the first several years the product was on the market. But in 2003 OCT finally began to achieve widespread recognition, and today Zeiss dominates the market for OCT in ophthalmology.
“The first studies in OCT were done in ophthalmology because the eye is a very natural system for the application of biomedical optics and we saw we could generate these very nice images,” Fujimoto says. “So we were excited, but it was not clear if OCT would have any real clinical applications. The challenge is to develop a new technology that solves a clinical need. If it works better than an existing technology, okay. But that doesn’t mean there is an actual clinical need.”
Nontransparent applications
Fujimoto has been instrumental in developing OCT for other applications as well. In 1994, a team led by Fujimoto and Brezinski began working with OCT imaging for optical biopsies in nontransparent tissue. This research led to a number of related projects, including cardiovascular imaging.
“Brezinski, one of the pioneers in cardiovascular OCT imaging, approached me about 10 years ago with the idea to apply OCT to intravascular imaging,” he says. “I was skeptical, but Mark is an MD and PhD, and he already had funding and was ready to risk a year of his time on this project.” The results were promising and Fujimoto became convinced that OCT has the ability to significantly improve the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Fujimoto and Brezinski, with help from their collaborator Swanson, a cofounder of Sycamore Networks, cofounded LightLab Imaging (initially a joint venture with Zeiss and now a subsidiary of Goodman).
Still, for all of his achievements and accolades—professor of electrical engineering at MIT, adjunct professor of opthalmology at Tufts University, and member of the National Academies of Science and Engineering with more than 250 journal articles, five books, and numerous U.S. patents—Fujimoto is at heart a soft-spoken scientist with a gentle sense of humor who prefers to credit the collaborative nature of the research community for the success of OCT. Ask him what he is most proud of and he will tell you simply: “The opportunity to train students who themselves have become leading scientists.”
“It is hard to have recognition for fundamental science or engineering in the clinical community,” he says. “Although the effects of these advances may not be realized for some time, you can have a real impact on society. If you are motivated by advancing scientific and clinical knowledge, and helping people, this is a very rewarding field.”
REFERENCES
- D. Huang et al., Science 254(5035) 1178 (Nov 22, 1991).
- C. Puliafito et al., Optical Coherence Tomography of Ocular Diseases, Slack Publishing (1996).
Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 CST 2008
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