<International Circulation>: What are the remaining unresolved problems in the application of OCT? What do you think will be the focus of future research?

Prof. Guagliumi: The future is starting now. OCT is a very recent technology and we already have spectacular results. We can use different characteristics of the light and it will have a very significant amelioration in the future. The first step of amelioration will be with the future frequency domain technology able to go very quickly into the vessel and scan it. This technology will come in the next few months and years and that will make it very easy to scan an entire coronary artery tree in a short period of time. The second amelioration that we are working on is in separating the different tissue characteristics. We have an optical signal and we can see the difference from an optical point of view but we are not sure which one is represented. We are working on applying different types of algorithms and light characteristics to separate what our eyes are identifying. The possibility is coming to use adjunctive technologies such as spectroscopy to have a better identification of plaque characteristics than is presently possible.