Medical diagnostics is rapidly evolving, and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is expanding far beyond ophthalmology emerging in such fields as oncology, dermatology, and stomatology. OCT signals contain a wealth of microstructure-sensitive features, including optical attenuation, speckle statistics, and optical phase. However, extracting and analyzing this complex data typically requires advanced programming skills, which creates a significant barrier for medical professionals and limits the integration of OCT into everyday clinical practice.
In a new paper published in Light: Advanced Manufacturing , a team of physicists together with clinicians, eHealth infrastructure developers and Oceanstart LLC have initiate a pioneering no-code, multimodal OCT-integrated online platform. This accessible framework empowers clinicians and researchers to harness the power of cutting-edge OCT signal processing without any technical complexity, streamlining the development of custom diagnostic applications such as disease classification and tumor margin isolation.
The platform, available at https://accounts.opticelastograph.com, serves two primary functions. First, it allows users to perform advanced multimodal processing of real OCT scans. Using a web interface, clinicians can seamlessly extract and visualize spatially resolved optical attenuation, speckle contrast, depolarization ratios, and tissue strain maps. Second, the platform incorporates a wave-based simulation framework to generate highly realistic digital phantoms of OCT signals. By inputting scatterer parameters and device properties, researchers can simulate complex OCT scans to tune and benchmark various signal processing approaches under strictly controlled conditions.
The research team successfully demonstrated the platform's diagnostic power using data from human brain tissue, skin, and endometrial tissue, as well as murine tumor models. The ability to accurately evaluate tissue characteristics using these advanced imaging techniques represents a significant step towards non-invasive cancer evaluation.
Leveraging the platform's Virtual Scanner, which accurately simulates OCT signal formation from given scatterer distributions, the research team has officially launched the SynthOCT 2026 Challenge - Digital Phantoms Simulation for Physics-Based Scans Synthesis in Optical Coherence Tomography. This initiative invites the global research community to develop algorithms capable of generating highly realistic, tissue-mimicking digital phantoms—specifically, spatial distributions of optical scatterers. When processed by the provided Virtual Scanner, these phantoms must replicate real target OCT scans structurally, statistically, and physically. Crucially, developing such physically consistent synthetic data and accurate scatterer distributions is a vital step towards training robust foundation models for optical biopsy and advancing future virtual histology methods in OCT. Teams must register on the challenge website before May 31. The challenge involves a two-step submission process. A preliminary submission of digital phantoms for initial validation is due by June 14. The final submission, which includes the full paper and code, must be completed by July 1. Detailed instructions are available on the official website, synthOCT.com.
Light: Advanced Manufacturing
Online platform for generating realistic digital phantoms of OCT signals and performing multimodal processing towards optical cancer diagnostics