Real-time multimodal optical microscopy for biomedical imaging

Abstract

There is a growing tendency of the importance of optical microscopy that is capable of acquiring high-resolution images from tissues and cells without any physical contact. Recently, many researches have been reported to acquire and analyze various photo-physical characteristics of a specimen such as ion concentration, molecular spectrum or molecular interactions, in addition to visualizing the micro-shape of the specimen. Even though multimodal optical microscopy is capable of analyzing various photo-physical characteristics by a single microscope system, it is hard to be applied for in vivo imaging because of its slow image acquisition speed. Therefore, this doctoral dissertation proposes a high-speed imaging technique for enhancing the speed of multimodal optical microscopy. Firstly, the imaging speed of each optical modality has been increased, and then the simultaneous image acquisition technique for visualizing the entire multimodality information was developed. Consequently, a real-time multimodal optical microscope system has been developed to analyze both high-resolution morphology and various chemical information of a live biological tissue. This doctoral dissertation deals with various contents including working principle, theoretical analysis, detailed design process and optical performance evaluation of the suggested multimodal imaging technique.