The Department of Optometry & Vision Sciences at Cardiff University Center is one of the few pioneering research groups of optical coherence tomography (OCT). The work within the proposed project will be supervised by Prof. W. Drexler, who joined the Department in 2006 and has worked in the field of OCT and development of broad bandwidth light sources since 1990. In 2000 he initiated ultrahigh resolution OCT in collaboration with Prof. James G. Fujimoto at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. Axial OCT resolutions of 1 µm as well as in vivo tomograms of the human retina with 5-10 times improved resolution (2-3 µm) could be achieved, enabling for the first time the visualization and quantification of sub-retinal structures. These results have been published by W. Drexler in Nature Medicine. From 2002 until 2006 he was the director of a research laboratory (Christian Doppler Laboratory) that is focused on the development of light sources for biomedical applications. His expertise in these research fields is well documented by several publications in international journals (about 100) and numerous invited talks (more than 40) at prestigious international conferences.
The motivation of CU to participate in NANO UB-SOURCES is to use their expertise in ultrahigh resolution OCT employing broad bandwidth light sources to contribute to a significant improvement of this medical diagnostic imaging technology for early diagnosis, especially cancer diagnosis and therefore to enable a new market in the medical field for nano-photonic devices.