NanoPlasmonics, Microphotonics & Imaging

Normal scenes captured by cameras involve light intensities spanning more than five orders of magnitude, which is often taken care of with auto-exposure/multiple exposures in high dynamic range (HDR) imaging technologies. Such technologies assign one or several uniform exposure levels and dynamic ranges for all pixels in the image, significantly squeezing the data precision for dimmer regions, causing fundamental information loss at the photodetection stage.

Ideally, each detector should independently decide its tradeoff between responsivity and speed. For...

Multispectral and hyperspectral imaging are important optical inspection technologies. They collect the spatial and spectral information of the incidental light into 3D hypercubes, which can be post-processed into material and structural mapping of the scene. However, acquiring and analyzing the 3D hypercubes set great challenges in data collection, transportation, storage, and computation. The much higher energy, bandwidth, and memory budgets limit the implementation of high-speed, high-resolution hyperspectral imaging to achieve intelligent machine vision. This project introduces an...

Implantable sensors capable of real-time monitoring of complex cellular dynamics can provide critical information for understanding disease progression and treatment response, leading to more personalized medicine. An impactful application is in cancer immunotherapy which produces durable responses but suffers from low response rates (<50%). Multicolor fluorescence microscopy is a critical tool for the study of multi-cell type dynamics but limited optical penetration depth (<5 mm for 400-900nm) and bulky optics constrain its use in vivo. Therefore, wireless, miniaturized...

In curative-intent cancer surgery, intraoperative fluorescence imaging of both diseased and healthy tissue can help to ensure the successful removal of all gross and microscopic diseases with minimal damage to neighboring critical structures, such as nerves. Current fluorescence-guided surgery (FGS) systems, however, rely on bulky and rigid optics that incur performance-limiting trade-offs between sensitivity and maneuverability. Moreover, many FGS systems are incapable of multiplexed imaging. As a result, clinical FGS is currently limited to millimeter-scale detection of a single...