Biological tissue optics is a rapidly expanding field of major interest to the development of innovative optical methods and medical devices targeting the in vivo characterization of tissues i.e. the photo-diagnosis and/or therapy of pathological ones. Indeed, the optical properties of a tissue depend on its structure, organization, composition and metabolism, which in turn are modified by the pathology (e.g. skin and brain cancers).
The present axe focuses on the exploitation of light-tissue interactions in the UV-Visible-NIR spectral regions through multimodality spectro-imaging approaches. The latter include spectrally, spatially and time resolved techniques under reflectance and tomography configurations. The identification, localization and quantification of absorption, scattering and/or fluorescence properties are targeted in relation to the tissue constituents at sub-cellular, cellular and tissue scales. Skin and brain are among the most (if not the most) strongly scattering tissues and therefore the question of how to deal with it will be studied through several complementary approaches coupling spectro-imaging methods with optical clearing agents, acoustic modalities or polarization techniques. To conduct these activities, the PHOTONET IRN partners CRAN, WNLO, IF and TJU have together strong experience and recognized expertise in the development of (i) innovative multidimensional and multimodal spectro-imaging systems and their experimental validation on phantoms up to clinical settings, (ii) new algorithms for inverse problem solving based on photon migration theoretical and numerical modelling in complex media and in multiphysics environment and (iii) multispectral image reconstruction/analysis and multidimensional data classification methods.