Optical Methods in Medicine and Life Science

The main areas of application for optical technologies in medicine are:

- Visualization (e.g. endoscopy or surgical microscopy)

- Diagnosis (e.g. optical coherence tomography or fluorescence imaging)

- Therapy (e.g. surgical laser or photodynamic therapy)

With our research projects, we build a bridge between visualization and diagnosis. The combination of the pure visualization of the surgical field with a simultaneous evaluation of optical diagnostic information from the surgical field leads to the field of intraoperative diagnosis. This application places the highest demands on the reliability of the systems under the ambient conditions in the OR and on the real-time capability of the evaluation algorithms and the hardware used. Current research priorities are: