Wide field imaging at depth for the biomedical sciences

Light-sheet microscopy (LSM) is a powerful approach for fast wide field, low phototoxicity imaging. Its ultimate limit is optical penetration into the specimen. Existing approaches to overcome this challenge include illuminating the sample from multiple sides, the use of chemical clearing methods or sophisticated aberration correction. Though effective, a challenge is to develop facile methods for biomedical researchers and the emergent area of use in pathology. Recent advances, including those by our team, in high-resolution LSM have exploited advanced propagation-invariant modes of light, in particular Bessel, Airy and 'lattice' modes, for wide field of view with high resolution. This can achieve 0.000001 m resolution over 100s of micron field of view, but how may we obtain excellent spatiotemporal resolution (e.g. 100s Hz, FOV up to mm, sub diffractive imaging)? For this we can use super-resolution imaging as well. This will include structured illumination microscopy as well as other algorithms

This PhD project will explore appropriate combinations of light sheet and super-resolved imaging for studies in biomedicine. Particular studies will include applications for histopathology for colon cancer, lung cancer and renal disease with imaging on appropriate tissue samples.