Over the last three decades, multiphoton imaging has become an indispensable tool for biological and biomedical research. In particular, multiphoton microscopy is the go-to technology for in vivo fluorescence imaging deep within intact tissues.
In this talk, the fundamental challenges of deep tissue, high-resolution optical imaging are discussed. New technologies for in vivo structural and functional imaging of live animal brains using long-wavelength excitation and three-photon microscopy will be presented.
We will illustrate the requirements for imaging the dynamic neuronal activity at the cellular level over a large area and depth in awake and behaving animals, and show applications where 3-photon microscopy outperforms conventional 2-photon microscopy in both signal strength and image contrast.
Finally, we will discuss several future directions, including new laser sources, to further improve the imaging depth and speed in biological tissues. Although we focus on the applications in brains, the technology presented will be applicable to other biological tissues.
Chris Xu is the IBM Professor of Engineering, the Director of School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University, the founding co-director of Cornell Neurotech, and the director of Cornell NeuroNex Hub, an NSF-funded center for developing and disseminating neurotechnology.
Prior to Cornell, he was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories and pioneered breakthrough development of fiber optic communication systems based on differential phase-shift keying. His research areas are biomedical imaging and fiber optics at Cornell, where he pioneered the development of temporal focusing and long-wavelength 2- and 3-photon microscopy for deep tissue imaging.
Prof. Xu has chaired or served on numerous conference organizing committees and NSF/NIH review panels. In addition to journal and conference papers, he has 32 patents granted or pending. He has delivered > 300 plenary/keynote/invited conference presentations, research seminars, and outreach talks. He has won the NSF CAREER award, Bell Labs team research award, the Tau Beta Pi Professor of the Year Award, and two teaching excellence awards from Cornell Engineering College. He received the 2017 Cornell Engineering Research Excellence Award. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
Contact Michele Tharp for Zoom link.