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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Title: Quantitative Oblique Back-Illumination Microscopy in the Study of Biomedical Samples
Committee:
Dr. Robles, Advisor
Dr. AlRegib, Co-Advisor
Dr. Emelianov, Chair
Dr. Qiu
Dr. Jia
Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to explore the unique capabilities of quantitative oblique back-illumination microscopy (qOBM), a novel tomographic, label-free, non-invasive, real-time, and affordable quantitative phase imaging (QPI) technology, and to develop new qOBM-based optical and computational assays to warrant a more widespread use of this technology for biomedical applications. qOBM overcomes the limitation of QPI to thin samples, as it enables high contrast and high-resolution quantitative phase imaging of thick biomedical samples with cross-sectional and tomographic capabilities, providing valuable morphological and biophysical information about the imaged specimen. In this work, we first explore qOBM in its applicability in four clinical and biomedical areas, including (1) viability assessment of umbilical cord blood units for banking, (2) surgery assistance in the detection of brain tumor regions, and (3) non-invasive and in-line monitoring of the development of three dimensional (3D) cell cultures and (4) brainorganoids. Necessary modifications to the optics and image analysis tools are presented in each of the aforementioned applications. Secondly, we propose adapting qOBM for the study of cellular and subcellular structural dynamics. As part of this exploration, we consider various optical and computational modifications to the system required to capture fast biological processes and present data analysis pipelines to produce functional images of unlabeled live samples. Finally, we propose a multimodal approach combining qOBM and 3D fluorescence microscopy to achieve molecular and structural tomography. We expect this work to pave the way for the development of novel label-free platforms for clinical and biomedical purposes.
