Project: Focusing Light within Tissue using Photoacoustic Guidance


King’s College London | School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences | London | United Kingdom
Supervisor: Dr Wenfeng Xia

Project Description
Focusing light through biological tissue is of great significance for applications in a broad spectrum of life sciences including deep tissue optical microscopy, optogenetics, micro-manipulation, and laser microsurgery. Over the last decade, wavefront shaping (WS) emerged as an effective approach for focusing light at target positions inside or through scattering media [1]. This technique employs a spatial light modulator to optimise the phase of the incident light to enhance the light intensity at the target position within tissue. Briefly, the scattered light can be controlled to focus at one target position within tissues and then, the focused light spot can be scanned. By this way, biological tissues is made 'transparent' to make non-invasive, high-resolution, deep tissue imaging possible. Currently, one of the challenges in this technique is the slow iterative process that is usually used for wavefront optimisation. Recently, we have developed a high-speed method that uses photoacoustic signals generated within tissue as feedback (guide-star), which improves the focusing speed by more than 3 orders of magnitude compared to other photoacoustic-based methods in literature.

This project aims to further develop the photoacoustic-based system and improve the performance in light focusing.
We will investigate the potential of this system to:
• further improve the performance of hardware for faster implementation;
• further improve the algorithm and controlling programs for faster data processing and transfer;
• realise the high-resolution microscopy imaging within biological tissues in vivo.

The success of this project will open up new ways for the studies in biomedicine and applications in clinics.

Applications are invited from candidates with a 1st class or upper second degree in relevant engineering subjects such as biomedical engineering, physics, electronic and electrical engineering. IELTS 6.5 overall with a minimum of 6.0 in each skill or TOEFL 92 overall with a minimum of 23 in writing and 20 in each of the other skills. Candidates with knowledge in optics and ultrasound are preferred.

Funding information
King's College London and the China Scholarship Council (CSC) hold an agreement to jointly fund Chinese students to pursue doctoral degrees at King's College London.
Up to 100 K-CSC scholarship awards are available for the 2021-22 competition.
Successful students have their full international tuition fees covered by the university and receive, from the CSC, an annual living allowance (currently set at a rate of ￡1200-1350 per month) plus overseas student health cover, a return airfare to London and visa application fees. The Scholarships are valid for up to 4 years.

Applications Open: 26 October 2020  |  Applications Close: 6 Dec 2020, 23:59 GMT
For more information about the funding program:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/fund ... hip-programme-k-csc

Informal inquiries can be made to Tianrui (email address ztr01007@gmail.com) with a copy of your curriculum vitae and cover letter. 返回小木虫查看更多