New regulations standardise optical coherence tomography
5/11/2023 Regulation News

New regulations standardise optical coherence tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an imaging technique that produces high-resolution cross-sectional images of transparent and semi-transparent media. It is used both in industrial metrology. Companies and research institutes involved in industrial metrology and medical technology also expect a wide range of other fields of application. They cooperate in the VDI/VDE - Gesellschaft für Mess- und Regelungstechnik (GMA) in a technical committee OCT and have recently published the guideline VDI/VDE 5565 part 1 with standardised process descriptions.

Ophthalmologist in his office
The technical committee 1.32 "Optical Coherence Tomography" in the GMA department "Methodology of Measurement and Sensor Technology" has set itself the goal of bringing together expertise from industry and research and thus paving the way for further OCT application fields in the future. The standards published by the committee in January 2023 form the basis for the use of OCT in biomedical diagnostics and beyond.

So far, the comparatively new measurement method has not yet been described in a universally valid way and various procedures and performance characteristics have not yet been standardised. This meant that the comparability of different OCT systems was not given and a wider dissemination was limited. This is now to change through the standardisation work of the technical committee.

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