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Optical Imaging in Human Disease and Biological Research pp 1–22Cite as

Fundamentals of Optical Imaging

Part of the Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology book series (AEMB,volume 3233)

Abstract

Optical imaging, which possesses noninvasive and high-resolution features for biomedical imaging, has been used to study various biological samples, from in vitro cells, ex vivo tissue, to in vivo imaging of living organism. Furthermore, optical imaging also covers a very wide scope of spatial scale, from submicron sized organelles to macro-scale live biological samples, enabling it a powerful tool for biomedical studies. Before introducing these superior optical imaging methods to researchers, first of all, it is necessary to present the basic concept of light-matter interactions such as absorption, scattering, and fluorescence, which can be used as the imaging contrast and also affect the imaging quality. And then the working mechanism of various imaging modalities including fluorescence microscopy, confocal microscopy, multiphoton microscopy, super-resolution microscopy, optical coherence tomography (OCT), diffuse optical tomography (DOT), etc. will be presented. Meanwhile, the main features and typical bioimaging applications of these optical imaging technologies are discussed. Finally, the perspective of future optical imaging methods is presented. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the background and principle of optical imaging for grasping the mechanism of advanced optical imaging modalities introduced in the following chapters.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (61805135), Pujiang Talents Program (18PJ1405100), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFC1604604), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (ZH2018QNA43).

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Author notes

  1. Liyun Lin, Pengfei Jiang, and Zhouzhou Bao contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Liyun Lin, Pengfei Jiang, Wen Pang, Shihui Ding & Bobo Gu

  2. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Ren Ji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Zhouzhou Bao

  3. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Gynecologic Oncology, Ren Ji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Zhouzhou Bao

  4. Beijing Key Laboratory for Green Catalysis and Separation, College of Environmental and Energy Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China

    Ming-Jie Yin

  5. Britton Chance Center of Biomedical Photonics, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

    Pengcheng Li

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  1. Liyun Lin
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Correspondence to Bobo Gu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Oncogenes and Related Genes, Shanghai Cancer Institute, Med-X Research Institute and School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Dr. Xunbin Wei

  2. School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Dr. Bobo Gu

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Lin, L. et al. (2021). Fundamentals of Optical Imaging. In: Wei, X., Gu, B. (eds) Optical Imaging in Human Disease and Biological Research. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 3233. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7627-0_1

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