LOOKING AND LISTENING TO COMPLEX BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
Event Dates
From: 02/10/2024 11:00
To: 02/10/2024 12:30
External Speaker
Dr. Giannis Zacharakis (FORTH / IESL, Heraklion Crete, Greece)
Place
FORTH Seminar Room: A. Payatakes

For centuries optical microscopy constitutes one of the most fundamental paradigms in biological and medical imaging, offering new avenues for exploration of biological function, detection and treatment of disease in living organisms and systems. It is indeed only recently that the Nobel Prize was awarded for the invention of Nanoscopy enabling us to observe and quantify biology with resolutions down to the nanometer scale. However, optical microscopy is significantly challenged by light diffusion in tissue, limiting its applicability to superficial depths (<0.5mm), reducing resolution with imaging depth. For imaging larger samples methods that provide three dimensional microscopic images such as Optical Projection Tomography (OPT) and Light Sheet Fluorescence Microcopy (LSFM) have been widely used. Furthermore, advances in optoacoustic and multimodality imaging have allowed to image in so far non-accessible regimes with unprecedented resolutions, based on the use of light for the production of ultrasonic waves. To significantly advance the resolution to penetration depth ratio and counteract the diffusive transport of light in biological tissues, radically new technologies are being developed for the production, manipulation and delivery of light radiation, based on adaptive wavefront control. These very exciting discoveries and advances in biophotonic technologies have now started to revolutionize the way biological research is performed, providing the ability to perform in vivo imaging in scales ranging from microscopy to macroscopy at depths from a few micrometers to several centimeters.