Soroush Mehravar

Multi-photon microscopy and applications

Today, ultrafast lasers play a critical role in the field of biomedical imaging. High pulse energies as well as ultrashort pulses enable high resolution visualization of specimen. Moreover, spatial confinement of high power pulses results in optical sectioning, providing three dimensional reconstruction of the samples under study. Although the bulky and expensive Ti:Sa lasers are currently the work-horse facilities for high resolution imaging in the field, there is increasing demand to replace them with compact and low-cost laser with the same performance. Multi-photon microscopy (MPM) is a growing label-free imaging modality that has proved its superiority over the other imaging modalities in terms of spatial resolution, penetration depth and induced (tissue?) damage. However, the size, cost and difficulty operating of the MPM may prevent its widespread use for clinical applications. As a graduate student in the “Ultrafast fiber lasers and nonlinear optics” group at College of Optical Sciences led by Dr. Kieu, I am improving and designing a low-cost and compact multi-photon microscope powered by a novel fiber laser platform in order to address the issues with current MPM. So far, we have successfully used our low-cost, handling-free and compact MPM for brain imaging, label-free diagnosis of dysplasia in Barrett’s esophagus and optical characterization of materials.