PFI-RP: A high-performance, low-cost chip-scale platform for medical imaging

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation – Research Partnership (PFI-RP) project is to democratize optical coherence tomography (OCT), an optical imaging technology that has enabled several medical diagnosis applications. Conventional OCT systems are assembled from bulk optical elements, making them bulky and costly, which severely hampers their adoption by the broader medical communities.

The project aims to develop a transformative chip-scale platform. By leveraging standard silicon microfabrication technologies – like those used for computer chip manufacturing – the new chip-scale platform may provide more than an order of magnitude reduction in the OCT system cost while improving imaging quality and diagnostic accuracy. The high-performance, low-cost, miniaturized device will transform OCT from a high-end diagnostic technique to an easily and broadly accessible screening tool.

The proposed OCT system, once realized, is anticipated to open fast-growing markets including point-of-care diagnosis, at-home disease monitoring, medical inspections in small clinics or community healthcare centers, affordable care for economically disadvantaged groups, and medical services in developing countries, among others.

The proposed project seeks to pioneer a chip-scale OCT engine to overcome the large size and high cost of existing systems. The intellectual merits of the proposed solution are two-fold. First, unlike conventional OCT systems which involve a beam scanner, an interferometer, and a spectrometer, all assembled from bulky optics, the proposed OCT system will assume a transformative single-chip architecture integrating all three functional modules on a silicon chip.

This approach eliminates complex assembly and alignment steps and leverages standard silicon foundry infrastructure to facilitate scalable, low-cost manufacturing. Second, while prior work has explored integrated photonics as a solution to miniaturize OCT, the on-chip components were down-scaled versions of their bulky counterparts. This project will pursue a cohort of architectural innovations to expand the OCT imaging depth and improve scanning speed and field-of-view while enhancing the axial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio, fully unleashing the potential of photonic integration.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.