Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Integrated Computational Optical Imaging (ICOI) is a highly promising approach that involves the joint design of modified optical hardware and digital processing algorithms to achieve imaging performance, e.g., high resolution, large field-of-view, high frame rates, that would otherwise be unattainable by the unmodified system.To overcome bandwidth limitations (spatial Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an important sub-surface imaging modality for numerous medical and industrial applications. It has one to two orders of magnitude higher resolution than ultrasound and typical imaging depth of (~ 2 mm) in biological tissue.1. Develop a real-time submicron-resolution compressed sensing full field OCT system 2. Develop & implement real-time sparse detection of vascular plaque from OCT images3. Develop a method to extend depth-of-field (>10 times) of high NA (magnification) microscope4. Generalize our OCT system simulator to allow imaging with finite-width light beams.We anticipate a high impact of our proposed research because 1) our novel full field - OCT system would allow 3D cell imaging cells up to a depth of 850 µ m compared to the 100 µ m imaging depth currently allowed by confocal microscopy; 2) the ability to extend the depth-of-field of high NA (magnification) optical microscopes, without loss of lateral resolution, optical power, or objective's working distance, would have a strong positive impact on a wide variety of scientific and industrial applications; 3) we anticipate a high potential for commercialization for the proposed extended depth-of-field microscopy and  the proposed real-time detector of vascular plaque w from OCT images; 4) the availability of a practical, accurate and fast computer simulator of OCT systems would be an extremely useful tool to enable and/or facilitate future design of higher performance OCT systems.  The proposed research program will also create unique opportunities to train 2 Ph.D. and 2 M.Sc. and 5 undergraduate students in both theoretical and practical aspects of Imaging Systems, Optics, Data Acquisition, Image Processing and Advanced Computing.