'Major applications' in biomedicine is future of supercontinuum light

It was coincidence that BioOptics World’s cover story on supercontinuum light "landed" during the SPIE Biomedical Optics Symposium (BiOS) at SPIE Photonics West 2014, when event organizers saw fit to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the supercontinuum effect.

But there's no coincidence that the article’s demonstration of benefits to life sciences corroborates discoverer Robert Alfano's statement that "the major applications I see [for the future] are in medicine" because the trend is established. There are other application areas too, Alfano noted. But at BiOS, it was easy to see that the marriage of supercontinuum and biomedicine is an area of focus not only for researchers, but also for laser suppliers and systems developers. A good example of the latter is Bioptigen, whose claim that its new Envisu XHR is "the only OCT system in the world capable of acquiring images with 1.5 × 1.5 × 1 μm voxel size" is based on its use of supercontinuum light.