BME Seminar: Breaking the Optical Diffusion Limit in Biological Tissue: Ultrasonically Guided Optical Focusing

Puxiang Lai, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Washington University --Optical techniques, increasingly important in biomedicine, suffer from the strong scattering of light in biological tissue. At the optimum wavelength, light can penetrate several centimeters into tissue, but it cannot render high-resolution focusing or imaging deeper than ~1 mm below the skin. Noninvasively focusing light into thick biological tissue is highly desirable but challenging.In this talk, I will present two novel endeavours¿time reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing and photoacoustically guided wavefront shaping (PAWS) optical focusing¿to reach this sought-after goal.