Optical Engineer Intern @ Vanderbilt University

Entity: Vanderbilt University
Location: Nashville, TN, USA
Dates: 19/6/18 - 14/9/18
Student Expenses: Student will pay all expenses including visa, tickets, accommodation, ...etc.

Internship Description
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a technology that uses broadband lasers and interferometry for cross-sectional imaging, similar to how echo time delays of acoustic waves are used in ultrasonography. Two main advantages make OCT an attractive technology for ophthalmic imaging:

1. OCT can achieve an axial resolution down to 1 µm; 2 orders of magnitude better than ultrasound
2. Does not need to be touching the patient.

Because of this, OCT rapidly became the gold standard for ophthalmic clinical diagnostics, and has been in commercial use for more than 20 years now. Developing OCT further to be useful in ophthalmic surgery is an active area of research, and is one of the projects being pursued by our group. The motivation is that, with the high resolution of OCT, we can dynamically render highly accurate visualizations of the interactions between the surgical instrument and the different tissue layers in depth, in both corneal and retinal procedures.

This may not only enhance the outcomes of current surgical procedures, but may also open the door for the development of novel surgical maneuvers that were not previously feasible.

We have developed a novel imaging system that combines OCT with Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (SLO) for simultaneous surface and cross-sectional imaging. The software that runs this system was also developed in our lab, in collaboration with Case Western Reserve University, and interns in this internship will use ZEMAX for optical modeling, building fiber optic engines and/or free-space optical imaging systems.