Light Conference Week 2023

Light has the potential to recognize the origins of diseases, enabling to prevent them, or to cure them early and gently. The early diagnosis is the key to improve the survival rate of patients. Endoscopy plays an important role in diagnosis as it offers keyhole access. However, conventionally it takes several hours to a few days for the surgeon to know the results. Optical histopathology offers real-time intraoperative diagnosis without tissue removal.

We present lensless imaging with multicore fibers using deep neural networks and wavefront shaping with femtosecond laser-based 3D printed holograms. The peculiar features are 3D imaging without pixelation and tiny diameters of only a few 100 microns, crucial for neurosurgery. The well-trained resolution enhancement network helps improving tumor recognition rate. It is promising for minimally invasive intraoperative diagnostics of cancer in neurosurgery using virtual staining.

The use of multi-core fibers as programmable wavefront shaping with deep learning for eliminating artifacts is attractive for the emerging label-free tomography of rotated cells and organoids, derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. The computational lensless multi-core fiber endoscopy paves the way for minimally invasive diagnostics in biomedicine.

Xingde Li received his Ph.D. degree in physics from UPENN in 1998, and he is a professor at the Department of BME with a joint appointment with the Departments of ECE and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University. His research centers on biophotonics imaging technologies and their translational and basic research applications. He has published about 140 peer-reviewed journal papers, with a total citation ~21,000 and an H-index~62 (Google Scholar). He has served on many committees of various societies and has chaired many international conferences including the Optical Biomed Congress. He is serving (or served) as a topical editor or associate editor for Optics Letters, Biomedical Optics Express, Journal of Biomedical Optics, IEEE Trans on BME, Light: Science and Applications etc. He is also the lead founding EiC for the recently launched AAAS Science Partner Journal – BMEF (Biomedical Engineering Frontiers). He is a fellow of SPIE, OSA, and AIMBE.