“Feeling with Light: Optical Strain-Imaging in Biomedicine”
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Abstract: Optical strain imaging in biomedicine, variously called optical elastography or optical “palpation”, is a branch of classical optical non-destructive evaluation (NDE) that develops new techniques or adapts and modifies many classical optical NDE approaches to the multiply-scattering world of biomedicine. The information provided by strain imaging is beginning to see applications in the diagnosis of many diseases, including skin cancer and atherosclerosis, in the evaluation of consumer skin products, in the on-line monitoring of developing engineered tissues, and in the exploration of the ontogeny of mechanical behavior in biological tissues. Our approaches to optical strain imaging take advantage of many of the unique statistical properties of laser speckle, a ubiquitous source of noise in all coherent imagery, but also a carrier of information that can be exploited to provide details about in vivo tissues that simply cannot be obtained in any other practical way. In this talk, I will discuss a few of the approaches to, and applications of, optical strain imaging that we employ at the Oregon Health & Science University and how the unique nature of laser speckle can be exploited for biomedical applications.