Jeff and Gav’s paper, Emerging Approaches for High-Resolution Imaging of Tissue Biomechanics with Optical Coherence Elastography, has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics!
Congrats to all co-authors…this is the group’s first journal paper! An Early Access version of the paper can be found here.
The new paper, Computational high-resolution optical imaging of the living human retina, demonstrates OCT imaging of human retinal photoreceptor cells without the need for hardware adaptive optics (HAO). Retinal imaging, the primary application of OCT, can be significantly improved through the use of HAO technology, originally developed for astronomy to compensate for atmospheric turbulence (that manifests as the ‘twinkling of stars’). Hardware AO has been used to to correct aberrations of the human eye and resolve photoreceptor cells, however it’s application in the field is limited due to the expensive, elaborate and bulky optical systems that are needed.
This paper is a collaboration with researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and builds on the computational adaptive optics work of Prof. Adie while he was a postdoc in the Boppart lab at UIUC.
A key result of the paper is that computational methods for aberration correction (with appropriate motion correction algorithms) can be applied in highly dynamic living samples – even during fixation the human eye constantly undergoes rapid micrometer-scale motions. Additionally, the post-data-acquisition capability of computational adaptive optics means that, unlike with hardware adaptive optics, the correction does not have to be optimized at the time of imaging. This allowed us to perform separate spatially-localized aberration corrections across the relatively wide field-of-views seen in the image mosaics in the main paper and Supplementary Information.
Prof. Adie’s talk at ECI Advances in Optics for Biotechnology, Medicine, and Surgery XIV, was entitled Computed Optical Coherence Tomography of Biological Tissues and Cells.
In addition to cutting-edge science presented by leading researchers around the world, providing a glimpse into the near future of Biomedical Optics, the conference was also a great opportunity to enjoy the magnificent outdoors of Vail Colorado (see image below taken during a 3-mile hike up the mountain).
The full speaker list and talk titles can be found on the ECI conference program.
Congrats to Yuan Yao, who took out the overall first place across all ECE M.Eng posters, and the winner of the Electronic Devices & Materials category! Her project is a collaboration with Prof. Amit Lal’s SONICMEMS group. Yuan’s poster was entitled Ultrasonic Beamforming and Steering for Acoustic Radiation Force Optical Coherence Elastography
Congrats to Xihao Zhang and Han Tang (the “GPU Team”) and Xiaochan Zong who presented the winning posters under the Signals and Communications category!! The GPU team’s poster was entitled GPU-based Real-Time Processing for Optical Coherence Tomography, and Xiaochan presented a poster entitled Multi-scale Optical Coherence Tomography: Comparing Computational and Hardware Methods of Reducing Numerical Aperture.
More information (including the winners of other categories and pictures of the poster session) can be found under the Recent News section of the ECE webpage.
Gav has made significant contributions to the setup of our OCT systems, the development of our control software, as well as to getting the group’s cell culture capabilities up and running. As Lab Manager, Gav’s service to the group will help ensure smooth day-to-day operation of the Optics Lab, and the group’s (shared) Cell Culture and Chemistry Lab spaces.
Jeff is an ECE PhD student who has a B.S. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University, with an emphasis on bioengineering and signal processing. His research in the group is focused on computational image formation methods for OCT and applications to biomedicine.
The group welcomes Gavrielle Untracht, an Applied and Engineering student who just completed her Masters.
The talk, entitled “Acoustic radiation force optical coherence elastography (ARF-OCE) of phantoms and biological tissues based on focused ultrasound excitation”, presented work begun during Dr. Adie’s postdoc at UIUC, and included contributions from Sri Nivas Chandrasekaran in the Adie Lab.
The group welcomes Ramin Jafari, the first PhD student in the group!
Ramin joins us with a Masters in ECE, and is interested in signal and image processing for OCT-based cancer research