Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  Optical microscopy of histochemically processed tissue is the current gold standard for disease diagnosis and research. However, many diseases can be better studied and diagnosed in living animals and patients. Driven by the need of in vivo microscopy, substantial efforts have been devoted towards label-free multiphoton imaging, which generates molecular and structural contrast based on nonlinear optical processes rather than external dyes. Despite the exceptional theoretical potential, current label-free imaging platforms are challenging for real-world clinical and biological applications. The major obstacles include the lack of flexible laser sources, limited contrast, and the challenge of acquiring and interpreting the high-dimensional dataset.

In this talk, I will describe strategies we have developed to overcome these challenges. By generating and tailoring supercontinuum generated from nonlinear processes, different molecular contrasts can be visualized without aids of stains, enabling perturbation-free exploration of living systems. These capabilities further motivate the development of analytical tools for image-based segmentation and diagnosis, showing the broad potential of this label-free imaging technology in discovering new metabolic biomarkers and enabling real-time point-of-procedure applications

Biography:  Sixian You is an Assistant Professor in the MIT EECS department and the Principal Investigator of the Computational Biophotonics Laboratory at MIT RLE. Her research focuses on developing imaging technologies for biomedical applications via optics, instrumentation, and algorithms. Sixian earned her Ph.D. and M.S. on microscopy from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and did her postdoc on computational imaging in University of California at Berkeley. She has been the recipient of a SCIALOG (Advancing Bioimaging) Award, Amazon Research Award, and Microscopy Innovation Award. Her work has been featured on the Cancer Research Cover, PNAS Cover, and Nature Communications Editors’ Highlight.

Location:  Analog Devices Hubble Auditorium