You may not have heard of optical coherence tomography, or OCT. But if you’ve visited an ophthalmologist recently, chances are your eye came within an inch or two of a scanning device employing the technology. Tens of thousands of these devices are in place in doctors’ offices, where they’re widely used to check for eye diseases. Now, Stanford University scientists have figured out how to retrofit these high-performance machines with off-the-shelf components, increasing OCT’s resolution by several-fold and promising earlier detection of retinal and corneal damage, incipient tumors and more.