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A stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) super-resolution probe was developed to selectively label the intercellular tunnel nanotubes (TNTs), which can be photoblinking illuminated with a single laser beam under low power density. The TNTs was precisely localized using the photo-blinking of the probe molecules to achieve live cell STORM imaging. The ultra-fine structures of TNTs were clearly observed under STORM microscopy, of which the typical diameter was eval [Detail] ...
Faster and better wound healing is a critical medical issue. Because the repair process of wounds is closely related to revascularization, accurate early assessment and postoperative monitoring are very important for establishing an optimal treatment plan. Herein, we present an extended depth-of-field photoacoustic microscopy system (E-DOF-PAM) that can achieve a constant spatial resolution and relatively uniform excitation efficiency over a long axial range. The superior performance of the system was verified by phantom and in vivo experiments. Furthermore, the system was applied to the imaging of normal and trauma sites of volunteers, and the experimental results accurately revealed the morphological differences between the normal and traumatized skin of the epidermis and dermis. These results demonstrated that the E-DOF-PAM is a powerful tool for observing and understanding the pathophysiology of cutaneous wound healing.
As a new method of cell–cell communication, tunneling nanotubes (TNTs) play important roles in cell–cell signaling and mass exchanges. However, a lack of powerful tools to visualize dynamic TNTs with high temporal/spatial resolution restricts the exploration of their formation and cleavage, hindering the complete understanding of its mechanism. Herein, we present the first example of using stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) to observe the tube-like structures of TNTs linking live cells with an easily prepared fluorescent dye. Because of this new imaging microscopy, the cleavage process of TNTs was observed with a high spatial resolution.
As an outstanding two-dimensional material, black phosphorene, has attracted significant attention in the biomedicine field due to its large surface area, strong optical absorption, distinct bioactivity, excellent biocompatibility, and high biodegradability. In this review, the preparation and properties of black phosphorene are summarized first. Thereafter, black phosphorene-based multifunctional platforms employed for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, including cancer, bone injuries, brain diseases, progressive oxidative diseases, and kidney injury, are reviewed in detail. This review provides a better understanding of the exciting properties of black phosphorene, such as its high drug-loading efficiency, photothermal conversion capability, high 1O2 generation efficiency, and high electrical conductivity, as well as how these properties can be exploited in biomedicine. Finally, the research perspectives of black phosphorene are discussed.
Cholangiocellular cancer (CCС) is an oncological disease of the bile ducts characterized by a high mortality rate. To date, the use of standard methods for the diagnosis and treatment of CCС has not been able to reduce mortality from this disease. This work presents the results of fluorescence diagnostics (FD), which consists in using a modified optical fiber and photodynamic therapy (PDT) using a therapeutic laser instead of a low-intensity laser. This technique was tested on 43 patients in a clinical setting. The results obtained indicate a direct correlation between spectroscopic and video FD methods. Furthermore, a direct correlation was found between the photobleaching of a chlorin e6-based photosensitizer, with the commercial names of Photolon Radachlorin and Photoran and stricture regression. Our findings demonstrate the possibility of using a therapeutic laser with a wavelength of 660 nm for both diagnosis and treatment of bile ducts cancer, which results in a significant reduction of the operation time without decreasing its effectiveness.
During intraoperative fluorescence navigation to remove various neoplasms and during pharmacokinetic studies of photosensitizers in laboratory animals, in many cases, the ratio of photosensitizer accumulation in the tumor and normal tissue can reach ≥10-fold, which inevitably changes their optical properties. At the same time, the tumor formation process causes various metabolic and structural changes at cellular and tissue levels, which lead to changes in optical properties. A hardware–software complex for the spectral–fluorescence studies of the content of fluorochromes in biological tissues with significantly different optical properties was developed, and it was tested on optical phantoms with various concentrations of photosensitizers, absorbers, and scatterers. To correct the influence of optical properties on the photosensitizer concentration analysis by fluorescence spectroscopy, we propose the spectrum-processing algorithm, which combines empirical and theory-based approaches.
The brain has an exceptionally high requirement for energy metabolism, with glucose serving as the exclusive energy source. Cancers, including glioblastoma, have a high glucose uptake and rely on aerobic glycolysis for energy metabolism. The alternation of high-efficiency oxidative phosphorylation to a low-efficiency aerobic glycolysis pathway (Warburg effect) provides macromolecules for biosynthesis and proliferation. Current research indicates that the specific metabolism in the tumor tissue and normal brain tissue in the glioma allows the use of 5-aminolevulinic acid (5 ALA)-induced protoporphyrin IX (PpIX) and methylene blue (MB) to monitor and correct the development of the tumor. The focus is on the detection of the differences between tumor cells and tumor-associated macrophages/microglia using spectroscopic and microscopic methods, based on the fluorescent signals and the difference in the drug accumulation of photosensitizers (PSs). Since 5 ALA has long been used effectively in the clinic for fluorescent surgical navigation, it was employed as an agent to identify the localization of tumor tissue and study its composition, particularly tumor and immune cells (macrophages), which have also been shown to actively accumulate PpIX. However, since PpIX is photodynamically active, it can be considered effective as the main target of tumor tissue for further successful photodynamic therapy. MB was employed to visualize resident microglia, which is important for their activation/deactivation to prevent the reprogramming of the immune cells by the tumor. Thus, using two drugs, it is possible to prevent crosstalk between tumor cells and the immune cells of different geneses.
This paper reports on the latest advances in line-field confocal optical coherence tomography (LC-OCT), a recently invented imaging technology that now allows the generation of either horizontal (x× y) section images at an adjustable depth or vertical (x× z) section images at an adjustable lateral position, as well as three-dimensional images. For both two-dimensional imaging modes, images are acquired in real-time, with real-time control of the depth and lateral positions. Three-dimensional (x× y× z) images are acquired from a stack of horizontal section images. The device is in the form of a portable probe. The handle of the probe has a button and a scroll wheel allowing the user to control the imaging modes. Using a supercontinuum laser as a broadband light source and a high numerical microscope objective, an isotropic spatial resolution of ~1 mm is achieved. The field of view of the three-dimensional images is 1.2 mm × 0.5 mm × 0.5 mm (x× y× z). Images of skin tissues are presented to demonstrate the potential of the technology in dermatology.
A numerical method that compensates image distortions caused by random fluctuations of the distance to an object in spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD OCT) has been proposed and verified experimentally. The proposed method is based on the analysis of the phase shifts between adjacent scans that are caused by micrometer-scale displacements and the subsequent compensation for the displacements through phase-frequency correction in the spectral space. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated in model experiments with harmonic and random movements of a scattering object as well as during in vivo imaging of the retina of the human eye.
In this work, via autocorrelation function (ACF) and permutation entropy (PE) methods, we numerically investigate the time-delay signature (TDS) characteristics of the chaotic signal output from an optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) after introducing an extra optical feedback loop. The results demonstrate that, for such a chaotic system, both the optoelectronic feedback with a delay time of T1 and the optical feedback with a delay time of T2 contribute to the TDS of generated chaos. The TDS of the chaotic signal should be evaluated within a large time window including T1 and T2 by the strongest peak in the ACF curve of the chaotic signal, and the strongest peak may locate at near T1 or T2. Through mapping the evolution of the TDS in the parameter space of the optical feedback strength and time, certain optimized parameter regions for achieving a chaotic signal with a relatively weak TDS can be determined.
Suppressing sintering of supported particles is of importance for the study and application of metal-TiO2 system. Theoretical study of Ostwald ripening of TiO2(110)-supported Pd particles would be helpful to extend the understanding of the sintering. In this paper, based on density functional theory (DFT), the surface energy of Pd and the total activation energy (the sum of formation energy and diffusion barrier) of TiO2-supported Pd were calculated. Since the total activation energy is mainly contributed from the formation energy, it is indicated that the ripening of Pd particles would be in the interface control limit. Subsequently, the calculated surface energy and total activation energy were used to simulate Ostwald ripening of TiO2(110)-supported Pd particles. As a result, in comparison with larger particles, smaller particles would worsen the performance of ripening-resistance according to its lower onset temperature and shorter half-life time. The differences on ripening-resistance among different size particles could be mitigated along with the increase of temperature. Moreover, it is verified that the monodispersity can improve ripening resistance especially for the smaller particles. However, the different performances of the ripening originating from difference of the relative standard deviation are more obvious at higher temperature than lower temperature. This temperature effect for the relative standard deviation is the inverse of that for the initial main particle size. It is indicated that the influence of dispersity of TiO2(110)-supported Pd particles on ripening may be more sensitive at higher temperature. In this contribution, we extend the first principle kinetics to elaborate the ripening of Pd on TiO2(110). It is expected that the information from first principle kinetics would be helpful to the study in experiments.
Text detection and recognition is a hot topic in computer vision, which is considered to be the further development of the traditional optical character recognition (OCR) technology. With the rapid development of machine vision system and the wide application of deep learning algorithms, text recognition has achieved excellent performance. In contrast, detecting text block from complex natural scenes is still a challenging task. At present, many advanced natural scene text detection algorithms have been proposed, but most of them run slow due to the complexity of the detection pipeline and cannot be applied to industrial scenes. In this paper, we proposed a CCD based machine vision system for real-time text detection in invoice images. In this system, we applied optimizations from several aspects including the optical system, the hardware architecture, and the deep learning algorithm to improve the speed performance of the machine vision system. The experimental data confirms that the optimization methods can significantly improve the running speed of the machine vision system and make it meeting the real-time text detection requirements in industrial scenarios.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photography has become the main power system inspection method; however, automated fault detection remains a major challenge. Conventional algorithms encounter difficulty in processing all the detected objects in the power transmission lines simultaneously. The object detection method involving deep learning provides a new method for fault detection. However, the traditional non-maximum suppression (NMS) algorithm fails to delete redundant annotations when dealing with objects having two labels such as insulators and dampers. In this study, we propose an area-based non-maximum suppression (A-NMS) algorithm to solve the problem of one object having multiple labels. The A-NMS algorithm is used in the fusion stage of cropping detection to detect small objects. Experiments prove that A-NMS and cropping detection achieve a mean average precision and recall of 88.58% and 91.23%, respectively, in case of the aerial image datasets and realize multi-object fault detection in aerial images.
In this paper, we propose a bored core hexagonal photonic crystal fiber (BC-HPCF) which obtains ultra-high negative dispersion and large nonlinearity simultaneously. The aim of the proposed design is to achieve the desired optical properties by using circular air holes only to make the fiber simple and manufacturable. To investigate the light guiding properties of the proposed BC-HPCF, finite element method (FEM) with circular perfectly matched boundary layer (PML) is used. According to numerical simulation, it is possible to obtain a large value of negative dispersion of −2102 ps·nm−1·km−1 and large value of nonlinearity of 111.6 W−1·km−1 at optimum wavelength of 1550 nm. In addition, ±2% deviation in optical characteristics is evaluated and reported in order to study the practical feasibility of the proposed BC-HPCF. The large negative dispersion and high nonlinearity of our proposed design make it a strong candidate for optical broadband communication, super continuum generation, and sensing.