Project description
Advancing point-of-care screening of retinal diseases
Diagnosis of retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration relies on microscopy and fundus photography-based methods which provide valuable morphological information but lack tomographic depth detail. Therefore, there is a need for noninvasive, high-resolution in-vivo imaging techniques that can provide tissue depth information for early and accurate diagnosis of retinal diseases. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging technique that addresses these demands but requires cost-effective solutions for its widespread clinical application. The EU-funded OCTCHIP project aims to optimise appropriate technology that will allow the miniaturisation of OCT systems suitable for use at the point-of-care.
Objective
Silicon photonics is expected to leverage-off many of the advances made in CMOS electronics. International R&D efforts in this field have so far been mainly focused on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology platform because it is predestined for datacom, high-performance computing and telecom applications. However, SOI based integrated optical waveguides cannot be used for the VIS/NIR <1.1µm wavelength region, which is important for life sciences and health related applications and, thus, offers a huge potential for PIC technology. To this end, a novel CMOS compatible low-loss silicon nitride waveguide based PIC technology platform will be developed in OCTCHIP and directly applied to the a strong business case in the field of optical coherence tomography (OCT) for ophthalmology.
OCT is a revolutionizing in-vivo 3D imaging technique for non-invasive optical biopsy addressing medical needs with early diagnosis and reduction of healthcare cost. OCT has proven its value primarily in ophthalmology and cardiology but recently also in a variety of other medical fields. However, wide adoption has not taken place due to size and cost limitations as well as non-existence of miniaturized devices.
The PIC technology developed in OCTCHIP will make a new generation of OCT systems possible with step-changes in size and cost beyond state-of-the-art. The monolithic integration of silicon nitride optical waveguides, silicon photodiodes and electronics combined with the hybrid integration of a III-V laser source will enable a compact, low-cost and maintenance free solution. OCTCHIP will contribute to radically transform OCT towards widespread adoption in point-of-care diagnostics for the early diagnosis of retinal pathologies, which are leading causes for blindness.
The endeavor is strongly driven by company partners with strong expertise in the fields of silicon foundry process technology, miniaturized laser sources, and OCT system integration.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineophthalmology
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrymetalloids
- medical and health sciencesmedical biotechnologyimplants
- engineering and technologymedical engineeringdiagnostic imaging
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RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
1090 Wien
Austria