Web Site a Key Source of OCT Information

Q&A with OCT News founder Eric A. Swanson.

The advent and rapidly growing use of optical coherence tomography by retina specialists, comprehensive ophthalmologists and optometrists is one of the most sweeping and game-changing advances in the history of ocular diagnostics. Present at the creation of this transformational technology was innovator, inventor and entrepreneur Eric A. Swanson. In addition to being a co-inventor of OCT technology, Mr. Swanson is also the founder of www.octnews.org, which in three short years has become the “go-to” online resource for information on new developments in OCT.

Here, Mr. Swanson answers questions from Ophthalmology Management regarding the evolution of OCT and his purpose in creating what has become the number one Web site for OCT information.

Q. Mr. Swanson, thank you for taking the time to let our readers know more about OCTNews.org. So how and when did the Web site get started?

A. First I would like to acknowledge the tremendous success OCT has had in the field of ophthalmology and express gratitude to all those scientists, clinicians, engineers and businessmen who have made it such a success over the past 25 years. Dr. David Huang (one of the co-inventors of the technology and the person who coined the term “optical coherence tomography”) and I have published an article on the OCT News Web site that can be accessed at http://www.octnews.org/articles/1027616/ophthalmic-optical-coherence-tomography-market-pas/ that shows, among other things, the rapid growth in publications, patents and products in ophthalmic OCT.

But in answer to your question, the OCT News Web site started on November 6, 2007.

Just to provide some background, I am one of the co-inventors of OCT. While I was working at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the late 1980s and 1990s, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Jim Fujimoto, his students such as Dr. David Huang, Dr. Michael Hee, Dr. Joseph Izatt and various other scientific and clinical collaborators such as Dr. Carmen Puliafito and Dr. Joel Schuman. We did work on time-domain, swept-source and spectral-domain OCT.

I have also been fortunate enough to have co-founded two successful OCT Companies: Advanced Ophthalmic Devices (with Drs. Fujimoto and Puliafito), acquired by Carl Zeiss Meditec in 2004 and which served as the basis of Zeiss's start in ophthalmic OCT, and Lightlab Imaging (with Dr. Fujimoto and Dr. Mark Brezinski), a cardiovascular OCT company recently acquired by St. Jude Medical for $100 million.

So generally I have a continual involvement and interest in tracking news and information in the OCT realm. I am also on the board of directors of a company called HiveFire, which makes software called Curata. To better assist HiveFire as a board member, I decided I would use the Curata product to investigate tracking OCT News and by creating a free not-for-profit OCT site. It seemed like a double win for me. I could more easily track the ever widening number of sources of news in OCT and provide technical and business feedback to HiveFire. Thus, OCT News started as a backburner hobby and has blossomed to a top ranking on all major search engines, a large number of continual visits from almost every country in the world, and has a large subscriber base to the daily and weekly newsletters. OCT News may be one of the best known and visited OCT sites in the world.

Q. What type of information do you select for the ophthalmology area?

A. The OCT News site automatically crawls the Web for a wide range of OCT-related news in all fields and from a wide range of sources, including corporate news, news wires, professional societies, trade magazines, journal articles, university Web pages, patents, financial databases, etc. Users also routinely submit information as well, including pending journal articles, product announcements, job openings, student theses, press releases and such.

This information is conveniently presented to me through the editor's interface each morning and I am able to easily go though and read and review it. Then, I can approve or reject each of the articles for publication.

The news is automatically categorized into four major areas of interest: Applications, Business News, Technology and Miscellaneous. Each major category also has sub-categories. One of the most popular sub-categories in the Applications area is “Ophthalmology.” I also write original articles and there is a “Feature of the Week” presented each week to the audience, which is usually in an easy-to-view PowerPoint or video format.

The software classifies articles as Ophthalmology using an advanced machine-learning algorithm. Ophthalmology has the most articles on the site, as a large percentage of the users and visitors are interested or involved in ophthalmology.

Usually an article for the ophthalmology sub-category is only approved if it is OCT-centric, offers something new for OCT in ophthalmology, or covers basic science and technology for ophthalmology. Articles that focus on a particular clinical condition that just happens to use OCT along with lots of other diagnostic technologies such as perimetry, fundus fluorescein angiography or ultrasound, are often not approved.

Q. Who is the site's basic audience in ophthalmology?

A. In general, as well as for ophthalmology specifically, the users of the OCT News site are an equal mix of leading OCT researchers, OCT clinicians, industry executives, engineers, marketing executives and students. There are also other users such as financial analysts, venture capitalists and end users, including patients, who frequent the site.

Q. How can the ophthalmology-related information be used by this audience?

A. There are several typical use formats for ophthalmology-related information. First, users can sign up for the weekly newsletter, or if they really want the fastest news possible, the daily newsletter. Every Monday, an e-mail goes out from OCT News to people who register for the free weekly newsletter and they can scan the e-mail for titles, summaries, a thumbnail picture and a category tag (e.g., ophthalmology). If they see an article that interests them, whether it has been categorized as ophthalmology or not, then they simply click on the link and can read the original source of the article.

The second use format would be a situation in which a person wants to search for archival ophthalmic OCT information. They can simply go to www.octnews.org and search for a subject, say “prematurity” or “blood flow retina,” and all of those articles that contain the search phrase will be listed by relevance or date or publication.

Users can also periodically visit the Web site and click on the Ophthalmology category to see just the ophthalmology articles since they last visited. If they click on the Ophthalmology category, they will see a river of ophthalmology news. They will also see a list of popular articles, the most prolific OCT companies, OCT products, OCT organizations and OCT people from an ophthalmology perspective.

Finally, often there are users who want to see the latest news from a particular author (eg, “Dr. David Huang”) or from a particular company (eg, “Carl Zeiss Meditec”) or a particular OCT product such as Cirrus. If they search these terms, they will see a “Matching Entity” and if they click on that they will see all the articles that are associated with their search term.

There are many other ways to use the site, such as asking the site to show all articles that mention both “Optovue” and “Carl Zeiss Meditec.” I would greatly encourage people to explore the site themselves.

Q. Do you get much feedback from readers?

A. The feedback from readers is very encouraging and I regularly get e-mail expressions of gratitude. Users seem to appreciate this free service to the OCT community and it seems clear that the OCT News site is a convenient way for users to keep up with what's going on in OCT in general or OCT in ophthalmology specifically without having to read hundreds of journals and/or visit hundreds of Web sites every day. Plus, there is the historical archive for browsing and searching.

I think the original publishers of the journals, corporate sites and primary content appreciate the OCT News site as well, since it drives traffic to their sites, which do host the original information. I should note that in addition to OCT News being a not-for-profit site, it complies with the “Fair Use” laws. As such, often there are links that go to paid-for content (e.g., journal articles) and only those behind appropriate university or corporate firewalls, those with subscriptions to a specific journal or those who pay for articles “a la carte,” can access the full content.

The constant growth in worldwide usage, as seen from the internal analytics used to track the site and the expressions of gratitude from users, is one of the reasons I keep running the site. This non-profit Web site is here to stay. I will definitely expand it with new features and functionality as the HiveFire/Curata engineers roll out new features and ways to benefit users and identify, collect, organize and share information. Recent integration with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn has powered more rapid sharing of information. In the future, our site may add discussion boards, host webinars and more. Also OCT News, in conjunction with companies, has sponsored initiatives to benefit the OCT community, such as free travel stipends to an OCT conference (Michelson Diagnostics and Santec), support for an ophthalmology clinic using OCT in Haiti (Bioptigen), and free use of an OCT system (Thorlabs).

Q. What future developments and uses do you foresee for OCT, both generally in a macro sense and specifically for ophthalmology?

A. In general, it is a very exciting time in both research and industry for OCT and biomedical optics in general. OCT technology and clinical understanding has matured and the realization of commercializable high-speed Fourier Domain OCT (FD-OCT) systems combined with perceived or proven clinical efficacy has catapulted OCT forward. The number of research papers covering a wide range of medical and non-medical fields is very impressive and bodes well for the future.

Equally impressive is the very large number of start-up companies or new product plans from established companies planning to enter the OCT space fueled by expectation that a $1 billion OCT market is not too far off in the future. The vision of an “optical biopsy” is tantalizingly close and some people feel is already achieved.

In commercial ophthalmology, Zeiss blazed the trail. While Zeiss is still the market leader, there are at least nine ophthalmic OCT companies out with competing FD-OCT products.

This is great for doctors. However, not many markets financially divide nicely among nine companies — as the first few typically own the vast majority of the market and the rest can be struggling or even loss centers. Companies will seek differentiation with higher speed, larger scan volumes, higher resolution, Doppler, polarization imaging, multi-spectral OCT, multi-modality OCT, improved software algorithms (segmentation, rendering and disease-specific diagnostic aids), smaller size and better user interface and data management features.

There are also new ophthalmic markets to tap into. For example, sales into the corneal, anterior chamber, refractive and cataract, and surgical guidance markets are still a small fraction of what may be possible. OCT systems will get integrated with other ophthalmic diagnostic and therapeutic systems and it seems likely that swept-source FD-OCT systems will have a big impact in next-generation ophthalmic systems in reducing size and costs.

In the future, a battery-powered OCT device with an iPhone-like display, micro-optical swept-source technology, some custom electronics and wireless high-speed interface may power a hand-held device as light and flexible as today's ophthalmoscopes. I can't wait to see it!

Q. Is there anything else that might be important to our ophthalmologist readership?

A. I welcome all input from the OCT community for ways to improve the site to further benefit the community. I also welcome input for articles that people would like to post on the site.

Finally, I would like to mention that while www.octnews.org tracks all news in OCT, including ophthalmology, I should note that there is an ophthalmic-specific OCT site also using the Curata product called “Eye On OCT” sponsored by Zeiss but having much more than simply Zeiss-specific articles. The site is well suited for those interested in just ophthalmology and offers readers much original content as well and I would recommend to readers to visit “Eye On OCT.” OM

Eric Swanson is a serial entrepreneur, and is involved in several high-tech start-up companies. Mr. Swanson consults for several venture capital firms, is a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Draper Laboratory and does a variety of volunteer activities. Mr. Swanson has authored more than 180 technical papers. In addition, he holds 25 US patents and numerous foreign patents. Mr. Swanson holds a BS summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.