Lihong Wang: World's fastest camera for ultrafast phenomena provides temporal information

Ultrafast video recording of spatiotemporal light distribution in a scattering medium has a significant impact in biomedicine. Although many simulation tools have been implemented to model light propagation in scattering media, existing experimental instruments still lack sufficient imaging speed to record transient light-scattering events in real time.

In this video interview, Lihong Wang of Calltech discusses a single-shot ultrafast video recording of a light-induced photonic Mach cone propagating in an engineered scattering plate assembly. This dynamic light-scattering event was captured in a single camera exposure by lossless-encoding compressed ultrafast photography at 100 billion frames per second. Our experimental results are in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions by time-resolved Monte Carlo simulation. This technology holds great promise for next-generation biomedical imaging instrumentation.

Lihong Wang is the Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Wang earned BS and MS degrees at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (1984, 1987); and a PhD at Rice University (1992).

His book entitled Biomedical Optics: Principles and Imaging, one of the first textbooks in the field, received the Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award. He also coauthored a book on polarization and edited the first book on photoacoustic tomography. Wang has published more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles and delivered over 330 keynote, plenary or invited talks.

He is the editor-in-chief of the SPIE Journal of Biomedical Optics.