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.