Modern advances in photonic technologies and their applications in biomedical research and clinical practice have raised immense interest in the scientific community, 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 [1]. For imaging larger samples methods that provide three dimensional microscopic images such as Optical Projection Tomography (OPT) and Light Sheet Fluorescence Microcopy (LSFM) [2] have been widely used. Furthermore, advances in optoacoustic 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 [3]. However, the use of photonic technologies still comes with significant disadvantages associated with the diffusive transport of light in biological tissue. Radically new technologies are being developed for the production, manipulation and delivery of light radiation, based on adaptive wavefront control to compensate for light diffusion and obtain high resolution images deeper than a few micrometers [4, 5].

These very exciting discoveries and advances in biophotonic technologies have now starting to revolutionize the way biological research is performed. The ability to perform in vivo imaging in scales ranging from microscopy to macroscopy at depths from a few micrometers to several centimeters opens up the possibility to shift biological observation towards longitudinal noninvasive studies of dynamic phenomena inside living organisms and help understand better human development, function and disease.

1. References

1. S. J. Sahl et al, Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol., 18, 685-701 (2017)

2. M. Rieckher, et al, Biotechnology Journal, 13, 1700419 (2017)

3. G. J. Tserevelakis, et al, J. of Biomedical Optics, 22, 060501 (2017)

4. D. Di Battista, et al., Scientific Reports, 5, 17406 (2015)

5. D. Ancora, et al., Scientific Reports, 7, 11854 (2017)