Measuring light where it has already scattered
The Biomedical Optics and Imaging Lab (BOIL) develops noninvasive optical techniques that quantify blood flow, oxygenation and fluorescence concentrations in living tissue. The work runs from the optical bench to the bedside, across neuromonitoring, cancer imaging and image guided therapy.
What we work on
Neurovascular monitoring
Time gated and time domain diffuse correlation spectroscopy, speckle contrast optical spectroscopy and functional near infrared spectroscopy, used to track cerebral blood flow and low frequency oscillations continuously at the bedside in traumatic brain injury and disorders of consciousness.
Cancer imaging and therapy
Quantitative fluorescence and spatial frequency domain imaging through a laparoscope, used to map optical properties, measure absolute drug concentration and monitor light triggered drug release during chemophototherapy in ovarian cancer models.
Optical instrumentation
Detectors, electronics and firmware built in house, including single photon avalanche diode arrays, superconducting nanowire detectors and field programmable gate array correlators that bring the analysis on chip and make real time measurement possible.
Tissue constructs and drug delivery
Optical readouts applied to engineered tissue constructs and to targeted drug delivery systems, where the same quantitative methods report on the state of a construct or on how much drug has reached the target.
How we approach it
Optical methods carry a hard constraint. Light entering tissue scatters many times before it comes back out, so the measurement has to be recovered from photons that have lost any simple relationship to where they went. Most of the work in this lab is about turning that recovered signal into a number a clinician or a biologist can act on, rather than into a picture alone.
That leads to 3 recurring commitments. Measurements are quantitative, so a value means the same thing on 2 different days and in 2 different people. The neuroimaging is label free, which keeps it repeatable and avoids the regulatory and safety burden of an injected dye, and where an agent is required, as it is in the cancer work, the measurement is corrected back to an absolute concentration rather than reported as brightness. And the instruments are built to be portable and multimodal, because a device that cannot be wheeled to a patient does not get used on one.