Chao Zhou, a Washington University in St. Louis engineer who develops novel optical imaging technologies for biomedical applications, has been awarded a Stein Innovation Award from Research to Prevent Blindness to pursue development of novel imaging methods for diagnostic uses.
With this three-year $300,000 award, Zhou, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, and his team plan to develop an ultrahigh-speed parallel imaging optical coherence tomography (OCT) system for motion-free imaging in children. They plan to implement this state-of-the-art technology in a compact, hand-held format to achieve 1.6 million A-scans per second imaging speed using 16 parallel imaging channels. This is more than 50 times faster than the commercial hand-held OCT system used for pediatric imaging and will allow acquisition of a high-definition wide-field 3D retinal OCT scan in a fraction of a second.
