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Thursday 29 January
Wednesday 28 January
Tuesday 27 January
Monday 26 January
Sunday 25 January
Saturday 24 January
Thursday 29 January 2009
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| | The exhibition floor had high turnout throughout the week |
Attendance for 2009 Exceeds Expectations
Many people watching the economy these days have said that "flat is the new up." SPIE Photonics West defied this conventional wisdom, with attendance for 2009 outpacing 2008 totals: 17,903 this year compared to 17,440 in 2008. Strong turnout for the exhibition accounted for much of the increase.
SPIE Photonics West Moves to San Francisco in 2010
Exhibitors looking for bigger booths, or those currently on the waiting list, welcomed the news that SPIE Photonics West will move to San Francisco’s Moscone Center in 2010. The facility offers more space, all under one roof, while the city of San Francisco offers many more hotel rooms near the convention center, at a broader range of rates. The venue is also more easily accessible to visitors from north of Silicon Valley. Exhibitors heard the news at 2009’s breakfast forum.
Two Students Share Top Lasers Prize
The prize for the Coherent-sponsored Best Student Paper in Solid State Lasers: Technology and Devices was shared by two finalists, Dominik Bauer of TRUMPF Laser and Univ. of Konstanz, and Jens Löhring, Fraunhofer-Institut für Lasertechnik. The Best Poster Award was won by Martin Fibrich of Czech Technical Univ. in Prague.
Wednesday 28 January 2009
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| | Chris Armacost of Daylight Solutions accepts a Prism Award |
SPIE and Laurin Publishing announce Prism Awards winners
SPIE and Laurin Publishing named Luxtera's "Blazar" entry as the overall best of show winner in the 2008 Prism Awards for Photonics Innovation, the premier competition for the photonics industry worldwide. Winners were announced at a banquet Wednesday night.
Winners in all nine technical categories:
- Aragon Photonics Labs, "BOSA-C Compact High-Res Optical Spectrum Analyzer" (Analytical, Test and Measurement)
- NoblePeak Vision, "TriWave Camera" (Detectors, Sensing and Imaging)
- Tessera, "OptiML WLC" (Optics)
- Coherent, "OPSL 577-3 Solid-State Laser" (Lasers; Tie)
- Daylight Solutions, "Broadly tunable, CW Mode-hop-free Laser System" (Lasers; Tie)
- Sensor Electronic Technology, Inc., "Deep UV Light Sources" (Other Light Sources)
- Luxtera, "Blazar" (Photonics Systems and Best of Show)
- Princetel, "FP180 Hand Polisher" (Photonics Processes)
- Solyndra, "Solar Photovoltaic (PV) System" (Sustainable/Green Technology)
- JPK Instruments AG, "JPK NanoTracker" (Life Sciences)
Executive Panel on High Power Lasers
At the executive panel on Applications of High-Power Solid-State Lasers, officials from several large manufacturers discussed the state of their business and prospects during the economic downturn. Participants included IPG Photonics, TRUMPF, Coherent, Spectra-Physics/Newport, and ROFIN-SINAR Laser GmbH. All agreed with moderator Andrew Brown of SPIE when he suggested that economic slowdowns can lead to innovation.
Sri Venkat of Coherent said that customers who may not be able to afford new equipment right now are instead investing in upgrades to push performance and reduce costs. "Downturns provide a lot of opportunities," he said. The theme of efficiency was emphasized by Bill Shiner of IPG, who said that now is a time to carefully "invest for the right reasons," adding that his company is "very optimistic" for the coming year.
In response to an audience question about how the industry was addressing the green revolution, most panelists agreed that while these lasers had improved efficiency from 2 percent to around 30 percent in just the last few years, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Ulrich Hefter of ROFIN-SINAR said there are gains to be made by "making lasers more efficient and using lasers more efficiently." Several mentioned new markets, such as in solar panel production and potential use of high-power lasers in the energy industry.
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| | Canadian Consul General Marc LePage with SPIE President Maria Yzuel |
Canadian Photonics Consortium ReceptionThe Canadian Photonics Consortium hosted a reception at their booth at Wednesday’s exhibition. Special guest,
Canadian Consul General Marc LePage thanked SPIE and Photonics West for the opportunity to showcase some of the innovative products and ideas Canada has to offer. LePage introduced SPIE President Maria Yzuel, who thanked the Consortium for their work, and welcomed their presence at next year’s Photonics West in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
Photonics Industry Panel Discusses RecessionA panel of executives at a panel on the photonics industry Wednesday agreed that companies would and should work collaboratively and partner in information sharing and innovation in order to weather the recession.
The group was generally upbeat about the possibilities for the photonics industry. Some of the bright spots mentioned by the panel included solar and "green" technologies. Ken Ibbs of Bookham Inc. believed the only dark spot in the current photonics industry trends were semiconductors, although Ken Kaufmann of Hamamatsu mentioned that the large biomedical machines are also seeing a downturn.
The panel members agreed that recession often spawns new and better innovations. Randy Heyler of Newport, now starting his own company, warned that companies will have to work together if they are to succeed and to push innovation further. In a time of cost-cutting, consolidation is also a necessary component of survival, including everything from sharing information to merging companies. Marc Sobey of Coherent mentioned telecommunications as a big candidate for this type of consolidation. He also mentioned that companies should choose a few programs to fund and not just cut funding across the board. Heyler warned this is not just a problem in the private sector, but with goverment-funded labs and schools as well.
Tuesday 27 January 2009
Exhibition Draws Large Crowd while Technical Events Discuss Cutting-edge Technologies
The stand-out event of Day Four was the opening of the 1100-company Photonics West exhibition, installed across three halls with companies from all over the globe. Traffic was higher than last year's opening day, business was brisk in the booths, product demos were well-attended, and the overall energy was strongly positive—as one exhibitor put, "there were lots of smiles." View the Exhibition Photo Gallery
The technical program also had many highlights, with topics ranging from nitrides to sensors to nanophosphors:
Klaus Ploog, from the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics in Germany, spoke on the challenges and prospects of both conventional and dilute nitrides in advancing photonic applications. While breakthroughs in conventional III-nitrides were realized over 15 years ago, Ploog showed that much is yet to be overcome. For example, the quantum efficiency in green emitters is far inferior to that in the red and blue. This is not often noticed due to the peak of human responsivity in the green; however this efficiency difference bars one from overlaying red, green, and blue to form a white light LED and results in a dependence on blue LEDs joined with red and green phosphors. Ploog showed other difficulties in conventional nitrides, including the occurrence of large piezoelectric fields in (Ga, In)N LEDs when driven at a hhuge current to generate high output powers, challenges in the growth of bulk III nitrides for substrates, and hindrances in improvement of the InN layer quality.
Ray Beausoleil of Hewlett-Packard Labs started by saying that he hoped to influence the crowd -- especially university researchers -- to invest in research to support a long-term vision of a CeNSE: a central nervous system of the Earth. This CeNSE would be a network of distributed sensors, to the order of a trillion sensors, distributed worldwide for all possible applications, from aerospace thermal sensing to environmental sensing and shipping verification. Given that such a global network would mean the passing of unthinkable amounts of data, realization of such a network would only be possible with a severe paradigm shift in interconnects, moving from the current copper technology to optical ring resonators. Beausoleil said that this will be necessary because the bandwidth for copper wire is fixed. While one can send one signal down a wire, many can be sent optically through DWDM, making it inevitable in future interconnects. Many challenges arise in fabrication, thermal isolation, the optoelectronic interface and signal processing. Beausoleil completed his talk with a look forward at quantum computing and with the declaration that industry really does still value the students who are prepared to work on the hardest, long-term problems.
Paras Prasad of SUNY Buffalo closed the session with a talk about the high societal impact that new interfaces amongst nano, bio, and information photonics can make possible, concentrating first on the promises in solar energy. Current technologies are lacking in the conversion of IR and UV energy, so one solution his group has explored is quantum dots with tunable absorption. For health care applications, the same group has investigated semiconductor nanoparticles for in-vitro diagnostics. These applications can be performed on excretions in a lab and are therefore free of toxicity issues. For medical imaging, Prasad discussed nanophosphors for contrast enhancement and silicon quantum dots for fluorescent biological labeling, while being twice interrupted by what he described as his "Obama-inspired" Blackberry.
Career Fair, Awards, and Other Special Events
There were both jobs and job-hunters at the SPIEWorks Career Fair, which runs through Wednesday, with several companies on-site to interview candidates.
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| | Newport and Spectra-Physics Research Excellence Award recipients with company representatives and SPIE President María Yzuel |
Newport and
Spectra-Physics Research Excellence travel awards were presented at a well-attended Student Lunch with Experts at the Sainte Claire Hotel. This program provides financial support for students to attend SPIE meetings to present theresearchrch, and is open to students whose papers have been accepted for presentation at SPIE Photonics West or SPIE Optics+Photonics.
A distinguished panel of industry experts including
Mario Paniccia of Intel Corp.,
Bert Jan Offrein of IBM Zurich Research Lab,
Ray Beausoleil of Hewlett-Packard Labs,
Eugene Fitzgerald of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
Ashok Krishnamoorthy of Sun Corp. talked about advantages, current applications, and future opportunities for silicon photonics devices.
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| | Women in Optics speaker Persis Drell (right) with SPIE President María Yzuel and Executive Director Eugene Arthurs |
Persis Drell, Director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University, told the Women in Optics reception audience about new work being done at the the center, and also offered practical advice about career directions. Make your own decisions about when to go to grad school, change jobs, or start a family, she advised.
An interactive poster session featuring papers from LASE and MOEMS-MEMS conferences wrapped up the day.
View Industry Perspectives Presentations:
Eric Wesoff, Greentech Media: Solar Power 4.0, Scaling UpBen Shelef, spaceward.org: The Space Elevator, A Space Odyssey
Monday 26 January 2009
Monday Presentations Cover Nanolithography, Scanning Microscopy, Fiber Lasers, and More
Attendance continued strong through Day Three, with a full audience for the MOEMS-MEMS plenary speakers, standing room only in the Fiber Laser conference room, and strong interest in the Multiphoton Microscopy in the Biomedical Sciences conference with its multiple sessions on techniques and developments in coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy.
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| | Chad Merkin presents the MOEMS/MEMS Plenary Session on Massively Parallel Soft Pen Nanolithography |
Opening plenary speaker
Chad Mirkin of Northwestern Univ., speaking on new developments in massively parallel soft pen nanolithography, noted that although the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) was developed around 1990, it was another decade before this technology was advanced to be able to deposit material on surfaces at very high resolution. Scanning probe dip pen nanolithography uses a probe very similar to the AFM, but with the tip loaded with the molecules selected for deposition. As the tip approaches the surface, a meniscus of water is formed and the chemical potential of the surface moves the molecules from the tip onto the surface in a single molecular layer. Today’s technology uses millions of parallel probe tips to write over large areas. Research is exploring use of the technology in the life sciences.
Plenary speaker
Harald Schenk of Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Systems discussed how micro-optical scanning mirror technology continues to evolve from telecom applications to those in displays, endoscopy, spectroscopy and microscopy. Small fast scanning mirrors are ideal for developing full-color imaging systems for endoscopes. A particular design discussed showed 3 light sources (RGB) combined onto a single illumination fiber. The fiber illumination is routed through a central hole in the miniature scanning mirror and reflected onto the mirror off of the internal surface of a coated dome lens on the end of the endoscope. After scanning the object, the reflected light is collected by a multimode fiber where the 3 wavelengths are separated and detected to form an image. Schenk also discussed other designs and applications such as a very large-angle scan mirror for displays and a scanning grating mirror with blazed surface for high efficiency and resolution spectroscopy.
In paper 7195-07,
Valentin Gaponstev of IPG described new developments in fiber lasers and components using very high-power fiber lasers and components for laser materials processing such as welding, cutting and drilling. One of the newer applications include the scribing of cadmium telluride materials used in the production of photovoltaic cells. New developments in the components include very high-power beam combiners and beam switches that can handle up to 20 KW of laser power with no thermal-optical shift during operation. New developments in laser technology involve moving high-power laser platforms to smaller core fibers for improved beam shapes and increased intensity. The 20KW fiber laser was previously only available in 100 micron core fiber but is now available in 50 micron core fiber. Also, a green light source module is available that produces 15W of CW green light at 532 nm. The pump system consists of a 2 stage amplified laser system, but the green light source conversion module is fiber fed and can be small and located at the job location.
In paper 7183-33
Alex van Rhijn of Univ. Twente discussed applications for CARS microscopy, an imaging technique based on contrast derived from molecular vibrations. The major advantage of CARS is that the signal yield is much higher, typically about 5 orders of magnitude, than what can be obtained through the spontaneous Raman scattering process. The particular advancement discussed in this paper involves using a broad wavelength source to excite multiple vibrational modes simultaneously and applying a spectral phase shift to the imaging signal that allows for demodulation and extraction of the individual vibrational modes with higher sensitivity and increased specificity.
The evening Biomedical Optics poster session followed the trend of the week for that symposium, drawing a large crowd.
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| Duco Jansen, Steven Jaques, and Patrick Roach |
Outstanding Contributions HonoredOptical Interactions with Tissue and Cells Conference Chairs
Duco Jansen and
Patrick Roach joined SPIE in honoring
Steven Jacques who is stepping down as chair after 20 years of leadership in the field of laser-tissue interactions. Jacques has been very influential in the field and is widely recognized as a teacher as well.
In the conference on Colloidal Quantum Dots for Biomedical Applications, the Ocean Optics Young Investigator Awards was presented to
Kelly Boeneman for her paper titled “Peptide linkers for the assembly of semiconductor quantum dot bioconjugates."
Fifteen of SPIE’s new Fellows elected in 2009 were named at a banquet honoring all Fellows present at Photonics West. Fellows are named throughout the year at the SPIE meeting chosen by each new Fellow. Honored at Photonics West were
Dr. Francesco Baldini,
Dr. Steve Boppart,
Dr. Julian Bristow,
Dr. Zhongping Chen,
Prof. Thomas Dickinson,
Prof. Jesper Glückstad,
Dr. Claire Max,
Prof. Risto Myllylä,
Dr. Boon Ooi,
Mr. Jacobus Oschmann,
Prof. Andreas Ostendorf,
Prof. Stanley Pau, and
Prof. Alfred Vogel.
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Mario Paniccia speaks at the
Fellows Luncheon |
Fellows luncheon speaker
Mario Paniccia, Intel Fellow and Director of Photonics Technology Labs, described breakthroughs in development of the ability to make optics in silicon photonics, a technology with promise to dramatically cut costs and increase computing power. See more on Paniccia in coming weeks in the
SPIE Newsroom.
It was an evening for receptions, including a gathering where cluster leadership met to share strategies for success, an Early Career Professionals social, the all-symposium welcome reception, the SPIE Members reception, and a “no-ties” student social wrapping up the evening.
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| Morning BiOS Coffee Break |
Sunday 25 January 2009
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SPIE President María Yzuel with scholarship
recipients Dimitris Gorpas, Kye-Sung Lee, Thomas O’Sullivan, Erik Sorenson, and William Warger |
A Day Packed with Awards, Scholarships, and Key Research FindingsDay Two was a day for networking and recognition as well as technical events. A luncheon offering students the chance to talk with top experts was also an opportunity for SPIE to present scholarships to five students in biomedical optics. In making the awards, SPIE President
Maria Yzuel noted that SPIE has presented more than $2 million in scholarships since 1978, and in 2008 awarded $262,000 in scholarships to 149 students.
Dimitris Gorpas,
Kye-Sung Lee,
Thomas O’Sullivan,
Erik Sorenson, and
William Warger received scholarships at the luncheon.
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 | Kazuhiro Kurokawa of the Univ. of Tsukuba, left, was awarded the Pascal Rol Award for the Best Paper in Ophthalmic Technologies. Arthur Ho of the Australian Institute for Eye Research, at right, is one of five members of the committee who selected the award finalists and winner. The award is sponsored by the Topcon Advanced Biomedical Imaging Laboratory through the Pascal Rol Foundation. |
Conference Chairs
Jörge Enderlein,
Rainer Erdmann, and
Zygmunt K. Gryczynski presented The PicoQuant Young Investigator Award to
Jonas Folling (unable to attend),
Sigrun Henkenjohann, and
Nathan P. Wells at the Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Imaging II conference on Sunday. The plaque and a check for $750.00 were awarded for the best oral presentation by a presenter under the age of 35 by PicoQuant GmbH Berlin.
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| BiOS Interactive Poster Session |
An interactive biomedical optics poster session filled the hallway at the Marriott Hotel Sunday evening, while in the convention center the National Institutes of Health (NIH) presented a workshop on the latest diagnostic and therapeutic developments in brain imaging, with a focus on treating patients with traumatic brain injuries.
Wibool Piyawattanametha of Stanford University (paper 7172-05) spoke about a MEMS scanning mirror confocal fluorescence endoscope. The application is for imaging into the layers of the skin and requires a narrow depth of field to reduce background noise. A dual-path device was developed with the source and receiver elements separated in individual fibers, to increase the numerical aperture of the system. A folded optic design allows for a reduced size of both the MEMS scanning mirror and the main focusing optical element. Reduced scattered light signals were realized due to the tight focal spot illumination.
Zhonglin Wang of Georgia Tech University (paper 7217-04) spoke on the use of ZnO nanowires for energy harvesting. The nanowires are piezoelectric and mechanical motion can be transformed and collected as electrical energy with recent developments in processing, fabrication, and contacts.
Ben Eggleton (paper 7226-01) spoke on the reciprocal relationship between slow light pulses in fiber optic gratings and nonlinearities produced in those grating by high power pulses. A high-power pulse incident on a grating generates a Kerr effect in fiber optic gratings which gives rise to a soliton pulse that propagates through the grating at one-fourth the speed of light (slow light) but without dispersion. There is a flip side to this topic in that nonlinear materials can be used to enhance the characteristics of slow light propagation.
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| David Moore |
David Moore was the first speaker in a workshop on Brain Imaging sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Moore is Deputy Director for Research, Defense and Veterans Brain Injury, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the DVBIC-AFIP, TBI Reearch Center, and is also TBI Scientific Advisor to the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury.
Jason Riley of NIH also spoke, and participated in a panel discussion along with Moore, Sergio Fantini, Tufts Univ., Enrico Gratton, Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic, Martin Schweiger, Univ. College London, Brian White, Washington Univ. in St. Louis School of Medicine, and Lorenzo Spinelli, Politecnico di Milano.
NIH is also sponsoring a workshop Tuesday evening on its XIP (eXtensible Imaging Platform) application, an open-source software platform for the development of medical imaging applications.
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| BiOS Interactive Poster Session |
Saturday 24 January 2009
Hot Topics and Standing-room-only Audiences
Day One of SPIE Photonics West 2009 was characterized by high-energy international audiences in conference rooms and the standing-room-only BiOS Hot Topics sessions. The 165 exhibiting companies in the two-day Biomedical Optics exhibition saw good traffic, and coffee-break networking was intense.
SPIE BiOS 2009 Symposium Chairs James Fujimoto, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), and R. Rox Anderson, Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard School of Medicine (USA), have assembled a program that is 1,500 papers strong.
A sampling from the conference rooms includes papers on imaging of cells for cancer detection, improvements for eye surgery, and other topics:
In an invited talk on IR spectroscopy for bones in the conference on Optics in Bone Biology and Diagnostics, Ruth Zoehrer (paper 7166-01) discussed how IR wavelength are matched to twist, bend, rotation, and vibration modes of molecules. IR spectroscopy can be used for monitoring bone structure, strength and quality. The technique is effective on all tissue can be done quickly with high resolution and is nondestructive.
In a well-attended keynote talk (7185-49) in the Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Imaging conference, Stefan Hell traced developments super-resolution microscopy. Traditional microscopy is limited in resolution to the abbe limit defined by the wavelength of the light source. This limit has been surpassed by using stimulated-emission depletion technology, where most of the excited fluorescence of dye particle is quenched by a second optical beam of different wavelength. The quenching takes place everywhere except at the highest intensity point of the emission from the particle. The resolution is set by the ratio of the intensity of the applied quenching beam to that of the saturation intensity of the particular particle. By turning the quenching beam power up, the resultant resolution is increased. Further advances in this technique are taking place by modifying the chemistry of the dyes to increase the lifetime of the quenched state or by using triplet state dyes.
Also in Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Imaging, paper 7185-01 reported on efforts to raise the limitations on single-molecule detection (SMD). Attaching fluorophore tends to saturate over time and stop emitting. Two-photon excitation is reduces the volume of excitation but only by roughly a factor of 2. However, surface plasmon coupled emission (SPCE) limits the volume to those molecules attached to within 30 microns of the surface. There is no background signal because the light does not penetrate the sample. There can be enhancement effects such as metal structure induced Raman, and power levels can be low 200 nW to excite a single molecule.
The “gold standard” for measuring the state of enamel is transverse microradiography, which is destructive in that a thin slice of the sample must be taken and x-rayed. Also, an x-ray micro CT takes a long time to collect enough data to make an image. A talk by David Churchley (paper 7162-01) in the Lasers in Dentistry conference demonstrated a nondestructive, fast system to probe the state of the enamel using ThZ radiation with wavelengths ranging from 30 micron to 3 mm.
In the Ophthalmic Technologies conference, paper 7163-07 described a swept source OCT imaging system for the human eye that meets the desired characteristics of volumetric reconstruction, a large range to include the corneal topography, absence of artifacts, and speed in monitoring dynamic changes. The system uses a fiber cavity laser with an internal cavity length modulation to provide the necessary swept wavelength source with a sweep rate of 200 Khz. A dual interferometric optical system is used to scan the eye in both lateral and depth dimensions, while also monitoring the wavelength of the source. The dimensional resolution of the system can be changed by reducing the drive voltage of the inter cavity modulator. Lower resolution scans are used to image the entire eye, from cornea to fovea while monitoring dynamical changes like eye blink, pupil diameter changes, and eye motion. The high-resolution mode can be used to determine the cornea topography and thickness, which are necessary for laser eye surgery procedures.
A paper by Siemens (7171-14) in the Multimodal Biomedical Imaging conference introduced image and data processing techniques that can be used to determine segmentation of multimodal image data under conditions where the contrast is insufficient to distinguish the actual boundaries of the biological elements.
Michael Sailor’s talk (paper 7167-13) in the Frontiers in Pathogen Detection conference gave several examples of the use of porous silicon as a substrate for sensing small molecules, enabling reactions, cell growth or death, or changes on the surface to be monitored through a simple color change of the reflected light. Porous silicon is created by electrochemical etching of a silicon substrate. The electrochemical etching provides precise control of the nanostructured surface through the control the applied electrical current. The resultant structure consists of a surface of many narrow and deep cavities whose depth and lateral dimensions depend on the etch conditions. The exact structure of these cavities offers advantages in making optical measurements on fluidic samples introduced to the surface. The optical measurement technique used is reflective interferometric Fourier transform spectroscopy. A double-layered engineered structure allows for simultaneous calibration and measurement of the sample. The structured surface can be used as a nano reactor that segregates reactants and products for independent measurement. A substructure that forms a photonic crystal in the etched silicon can be introduced through the etch process for monitoring cell reactions.
BiOS Hot Topics Session
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| Stefan Hell |
A full-house crowd heard a series of expert reports on Saturday evening that moderator
Sergio Fantini of Tufts University characterized as “important advancements in medical treatments and diagnostics being made by the field of biomedical optics.”
Stefan Hell (Max-Planck-Institut für Biophysikalische Chemie) discussed techniques of super-resolution in microscopy using stimulated emission depletion techniques. A super-continuum source is used to produce both the excitation pulse and the depletion pulse that allows for imaging of fluorophores with a spatial resolution in the few nanometers.
Kishan Dholakia (University of St. Andrews) talked about the use of Bessel beams (beams that do not expand as they propagate) to open pathways into cells for the delivery of dyes or drugs. The technique is called photoporation; a femtosecond pulse laser produces a transient hole in the surface of a cell to allow materials to be delivered into the cell. The method has been expanded to endoscopy with a fiber based delivery system.
Chris Contag (Stanford University) discussed optical imaging techniques that allow for monitoring the progress of tumor growth and regression. Tumors that have been driven into recession thru chemotherapy sometimes return and continue to grow after the treatment ends. Cancer stem cells have been identified that survive the treatment and regenerate the cancer after time. By targeting these stem cells, the cancer can be completely eliminated.
Charles Lin (Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts, General Hospital and Harvard Medical School) covered research on the one form of stem cells that has been approved for use over the last 40 years: those for the treatment of leukemia through bone marrow transplants. Newly developed optical 3D imaging techniques allow tracking of these stem cells to understand where in the bone structure these cells reproduce. This improved understanding will allow for the growth of stem cell in vitro which will increase the stem cell availability for treatment for multiple forms of cancer.
Summer Gibbs-Strauss (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) presented the underlying technology and capability of a near-IR and visible-range imaging system for image-guided surgery techniques. Fluorescent imaging is rapidly becoming an important technique for use during surgery to locate the diseased material to be removed. There are current contrast agents in the near-IR wavelength region. For this technology to advance there is a need for validated imaging systems and new validated contrast agents. This system has passed through a series of FDA validation tests.
Jennifer Barton (University of Arizona) described research in which OCT and autofluorescence microscopy were combined in a miniature fiber endoscope designed to image carcinogenesis in the colon. The two modalities provide a method of optical biopsy that allow for identification and classification of cancer-related diseases.
Arjun Yodh (University of Pennsylvania) discussed the validation of diffuse correlation spectroscopy as a noninvasive method for monitoring intracranial pressure due to severe head injury. Brain injury patients often lose the self-regulation of blood pressure in the brain, and current methods are either invasive (physical probe), time- and equipment-intensive (CT) or have low throughput (ultrasound). The technique under study makes use of near-IR diffuse optical spectroscopy and can be extended to monitor functional brain activity due to visual or motor stimulus.
Fiorenzo Omenetto (Tufts University) described properties of silk as an optical material for biomedical applications. It is biocompatible, biodegradable, mechanically strong, and optically transparent in visible wavelength region. Silk can be processed and molded to produce passive optical elements of waveguides, high-quality diffraction gratings, and photonic crystal structures. In addition, the silk can be doped with biological materials that enhance its properties for sensing applications and can even be made into an active optical element with the right dopant. Its compatibility with being implanted in a patient opens up numerous sensing and monitoring biomedical applications.
BiOS Exhibition
A total of 165 exhibiting companies put on a focused exhibition for the BiOS attendees. Biomedical optics and imaging companies displayed components and systems featuring the latest uses of the technologies being developed by BiOS technical attendees.
