SPIE Photonics West 2026 - BiOS Conference

Our doctoral students Miriam Sasse and Christian Schmidt presented groundbreaking results from their doctoral thesis at Photonics West 2026 in San Francisco. As the world's leading platform for laser technologies and biophotonic innovations, the event offers an ideal forum for science, industry and research. At the central SPIE BiOS conference, they presented their work on polarization-sensitive and dynamic OCT - with a focus on the precise analysis of dental hard tissue and oral tissues. Their contributions in the sessions "Polarization Sensitive OCT I" and "Dynamic Contrast OCT II" underline the high scientific relevance and innovative power of our research.

Christian Schmidt gave a lecture in the session "Polarization Sensitive OCT I" at the Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine XXX, which is part of the BiOS conference series. His paper "Single-input polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography for estimating local polarization states and optical properties in teeth" shows how PS-OCT can analyze not only structural but also polarization-dependent properties of hard dental tissue ex vivo.

© Miriam Sasse

Miriam Sasse presented her paper in the session "Dynamic Contrast OCT II" with the topic "Frequency-resolved dynamic contrast OCT and HSV-based visualization of oral mucosa". Her work demonstrates how dynamic signal fluctuations in the tissue layers of the oral mucosa can be used to capture biological processes such as microcirculation and cell migration.

Both presented Mr Johannes Reinhold's results as a poster entitled "Characterization of a polarization sensitive ultra-high resolution visible-light OCT system" at the conference "Polarized Light and Optical Angular Momentum for Biomedical Diagnostics 2026". His paper presents a high-resolution PS-OCT system with an axial resolution of only 1.38 µm and a measurement depth of up to 1.38 mm.