Optical coherence imaging

Optical imaging techniques play a significant role in medicine as they promise safe and low-cost solutions to many problems. Optical interferometry has been one of the preferred tools employed by scientists to help gain insights into various fundamentals of basic science and nature for more than three centuries. Over the last 25 years, the field of medicine has benefitted extensively from the rapid progress in the instrumentation and technology of low coherence imaging techniques, broadly classified under the terms low-coherence interferometry (LCI) or optical coherence tomography (OCT). OCT is analogous to ultrasound imaging, but instead of using sound waves, it uses low-coherent (broadband) light.

Since our lab started in early 2000s, our research interests have been developing OCT techniques and building systems to solve complex problems in biomedicine. In OCT, as in other imaging modalities, one desires to achieve the highest possible image quality, such as resolution, contrast, and depth, given instrument limitations. We have previously developed contrast-agents, computational methods, and novel processing algorithms to improve image qualities in biological tissues. We have also developed various systems to extract the functional (physiological) information from tissue, such as with optical coherence elastography (OCE), magnetomotive OCT (MM-OCT), polarization-sensitive OCT (PS-OCT), and spectroscopic OCT (SOCT).

To date, OCT has been demonstrated as a useful imaging technique for a wide range of biological, medical, and small animal research applications, including ophthalmology, cardiology, oncology, and dermatology. To facilitate translational OCT imaging, our lab has designed numerous imaging platforms and handheld probe-based OCT systems for a clinical setting. With our portable cart-based systems, we have intraoperatively assessed lymph node, tumor margin, and surrounding microenvironment for cancer imaging and diagnosis. Furthermore, we have implemented our handheld OCT probes to the traditional diagnostic devices used in primary care offices to advance the diagnostic and monitoring capabilities, focusing on middle ear infections.  

More recently, with the increasing power and promise of machine learning and artificial intelligence in biomedical imaging, we are also developing novel data analysis and classification methods to further understand our multidimensional datasets and to enhance the medical diagnostic capability. Thus, advancing OCT techniques, conducting interdisciplinary and translational OCT research, and computationally analyzing and studying the biological phenomena are the three most important aspects of our OCT research at the Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory.