Focusing light through living tissue

I. M. Vellekoop; C. M. Aegerter

doi:10.1117/12.841159

19 February 2010 Focusing light through living tissue

I. M. Vellekoop, C. M. Aegerter

Proceedings Volume 7554, Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine XIV; 755430 (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.841159
Event: SPIE BiOS, 2010, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

Tissues such as skin, fat or cuticle are non-transparent because inhomogeneities in the tissue scatter light. We demonstrate experimentally that light can be focused through turbid layers of living tissue, in spite of scattering. Our method is based on the fact that coherent light forms an interference pattern, even after hundreds of scattering events. By spatially shaping the wavefront of the incident laser beam, this interference pattern was modified to make the scattered light converge to a focus. In contrast to earlier experiments, where light was focused through solid objects, we focused light through living pupae of Drosophila melanogaster. We discuss a dynamic wavefront shaping algorithm that follows changes due to microscopic movements of scattering particles in real time. We relate the performance of the algorithm to the measured timescale of the changes in the speckle pattern and analyze our experiment in the light of Laser Doppler flowmetry. Applications in particle tracking, imaging, and optical manipulation are discussed.

Citation Download Citation

I. M. Vellekoop and C. M. Aegerter "Focusing light through living tissue", Proc. SPIE 7554, Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine XIV, 755430 (19 February 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.841159

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