January 24, 2003
Friday - 12:15 pm in Swain East 140
Speaker: Dr. Ping Yu, Purdue University
Title: Holographic Video "Fly-Throughs" of Osteogenic Tumor Spheroids
Abstract:
A long-standing effort in biomedical imaging has been the search for clinical situations where optical imaging can provide valuable diagnostic information that is not accessible by other approaches. The search has been significantly aided by the fact that light in the near infrared is not strongly absorbed as it propagates through most biological tissue, even though significant scatter produces an incoherent "glare" that obscures underlying coherent image-bearing light. Just as sun glasses can remove the glare from a windshield, a "simple" holographic filter can remove the incoherent glare to allow the image-bearing light to be imaged in a conventional digital camera. Here I will demonstrate holographic visual "fly-throughs" of living tumor tissue. The fly-through data consist of cross-sectional video frames recorded by a digital camera from successive depths inside rat osteogenic sarcoma tumor spheroids in vitro. An optoelectronic semiconductor device is used as an adaptive (self-updating) holographic film that acts as the simple coherence filter. The images from the tumor spheroids reveal heterogeneous structures presumably caused by necrosis and microcalcifications characteristic of avascular human tumors.