February 26
@
12:00 PM
–
1:00 PM
Imaging Across the Scales: Development of Optical Imaging Techniques
Abhishek Kumar, PhD
Investigator and CZI Imaging Scientist
Marine Biological Laboratory
Woods Hole
Abstract:
Optical imaging is one of the core technologies used in biomedical sciences. Despite the wide range of imaging techniques available, there is no one universal imaging system suitable for all scales and types of biological samples. Also, development of new optical imaging systems that can bridge existing gaps between cellular and organismal imaging is vital. Confocal and light sheet microscopes are two popular modalities that are routinely used for imaging live and fixed samples at multiple spatial and temporal scales. For the first portion of this talk, we will discuss our group’s efforts to advance these technologies for imaging large or rapidly growing samples at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Specifically, we will present our implementation of a confocal microscope for improving imaging speed by a few orders of magnitude for large samples. Additionally, we will present how microscope’s performance can be quantified using nanofabricated structures and show some early efforts in this area. We will then show the use of this imaging technique, in collaboration with your colleagues, to answer important biological questions in systems ranging from living zebrafish embryos to whole cleared mammalian organs.
In the second half of my talk, we will discuss our efforts in developing a multimodal multiparametric system to enable us to use fluorescence for mapping spatial, spectral, orientation and lifetime of fluorescent molecules for biological applications. We will discuss the computational tools we are developing and using for these imaging modalities. We will conclude by sharing our lab’s vision for the future and plan to integrate nanophotonics to augment imaging modalities.
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