High-Speed Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Based On Spatiotemporally-Encoded Pulsed Sources (STEPS) Engineering

Professor Tsia, Kevin Kin Man   (Principal Investigator (PI))

36

2018-01-01

600000

High-Speed Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Based On Spatiotemporally-Encoded Pulsed Sources (STEPS) Engineering

biophotonics, high-speed optical imaging

Photonics,Others - Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Engineering (E)

17209017

General Research Fund (GRF)

2017

Completed

1) Spatiotemporal engineering of STEPS tailored for time-domain FLIM – Harnessing the spatiotemporal encoding nature of STEPS, we will design and optimize the spatial and temporal properties of STEPS respectively, by an interleaved three-dimensional delay-path strategy, with the aim of maximizing the scan rate and the spatial density of scan-spots of time-domain FLIM; 2) Development of the STEPS-FLIM prototype – We will establish the STEPS-FLIM microscope, built upon the knowledge of the desired STEPS specifications, with the optical sectioning capability enabled by either a single-photon confocal or a two-photon implementation. System characterization will be carried out in terms the noise performance and its trade off with the imaging speed; 3) Exploration of the potential applications – We will exploit the STEPS-FLIM prototype for enabling new approaches in high-speed dynamical study of molecular interactions with local microenvironments, especially high-speed FLIM-FRET for visualizing dynamical changes in subcellular organization (e.g. nucleosomal DNA); and real-time in-vivo FLIM for monitoring metabolic changes associated with drug response in the context of bacterial cancer therapy.