Research
My work develops optical imaging tools that see what current clinical instruments cannot in the human retina: capillary-level blood flow, the precise architecture of the outer retina, and the earliest signatures of disease before vision is lost.
Capillary-level blood flow speed imaging
OCT angiography has long shown where blood flows in the retina, but not how fast. I developed a temporal-autocorrelation framework for Variable Interscan Time Analysis (VISTA) OCTA that recovers quantitative capillary blood flow speeds at the single capillary level.
Hwang et al., Biomedical Optics Express 14(6):2658 (2023) · Editor's Pick.
Hemodynamics in retinal disease
Using VISTA OCTA as a measurement instrument, I study how blood flow changes across the spectrum of retinal disease. In diabetic retinopathy, I have shown that as disease severity progresses, capillaries drop out and the surviving capillaries carry faster blood flow. In age-related macular degeneration, I have found that the choriocapillaris underlying large hypertransmission defects exhibits severe blood flow impairment that extends past the visible lesion margin, linking hemodynamic injury to a structural predictor of vision loss.
Hwang et al., RETINA 45(1):35 (2025) · Hwang et al., Ophthalmology Science 6(3):101060 (2026).
High-resolution OCT of the outer retina
Photoreceptors are ultimately responsible for vision, so detecting changes in them as early as possible matters. I use high-resolution OCT to measure subcellular structural disruptions in the photoreceptors in age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.
Looking forward
As I move toward an independent program, I am most interested in pushing the limits of what we can detect from retinal capillaries. The retinal circulation is the only optically accessible capillary network in the central nervous system, and I see it as a window into vascular and neurological health far beyond the eye.