I noted a while back that someone here mentioned breast imaging applications. I poked around that area a bit this evening.
The self proclaimed leader in the field now has struggled quite a lot over the last few years. Their shares are currently dropping like a rock after they floated another 50 million shares for sale, usefully requiring an S-1. Other highlights include a CEO who just left, replaced by bringing back a former CEO, three board members just forced to depart by new investors, a goodly number of outstanding convertible bonds and preferred convertible issues, with no bond conversion price floors... all on top of an FDA rejection of their PMA, which, finally, after a few years of floundering around, they have decided to just pull and resubmit. Their current trials are in Europe and China... not really moving them closer to fielding in the U.S. The financial difficulties seem they may have caused some stalling in new technical development as well as in operations.
It seems there is already quite a lot of evidence from research university programs that time domain, frequency domain, and spectroscopic technology wrinkles will contribute much to improving utility of the technology. The LNGT laser features that make it ideal for OCT applications in dentistry seem as well suited to OCT in other applications. Multi-freq and tunable lasers with four frequencies available will enable a vastly higher specificity in imaging differences in breast tissue physiology. The promise of the technology is important, but the foot dragging in the conduct of the effort in getting it to market has been less than helpful to those who need better capability than exists now.
I find it a vastly more interesting area for new products than many others in medicine... not least because the existing competitors aren't getting the job done... but also because the need is fairly critical, with lots of dollars wasted now on multiple technologies applied in trying to overcome the image utility limits of the other imaging technologies. The laser approach, done properly, should provide a vastly better ability to provide useful images that truly answer questions up front, with vastly higher resolution... reducing imaging costs and radiation exposures, while also reducing the need for unnecessary biopsies, and most critical, solving imaging issues in dense tissues, which currently limit the half of the patient population with four to six times higher risk, to determination efficiencies of only 35%. The laser tech will solve the problem with dense tissue interference with imaging, providing vastly higher resolution AND physiological specificity for those most at risk who are least well supported by the current tools.
An effort with an adequate technology base, and an adequate plan for getting the technology through the bureaucracy to have its use approved... will have both a crying unmet market need along with cost reductions from reduction of duplication in imaging methods used now as drivers pushing it into the market.
