The Applied Optics Group was well represented at the 2019 edition of SPIE Photonics West, which again took place at the Moscone Center in (not-so-sunny this time) San Francisco, California. Four AOG members have attended the conference, which lasted a total of six days, all presenting talks and posters resulting from peer-reviewed submissions.
Prof Adrian Podoleanu was first, straight on Saturday morning, giving a talk at the High-Speed Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy conference titled Speeding up master slave optical coherence tomography by matrix manipulation, covering the group’s latest achievements on complex Master/Slave interferometry (CMSI). Prof Podoleanu also chaired the High Speed Volumetric Microscopy session of this conference later in the day.
PDRA Dr Manuel Marques also presented later on the same day at the Endoscopic Microscopy conference, with a talk on a multi-modal endoscopic OCT/fluorescence imager titled Multi-modal OCT/fluorescence en-face surgical imaging using a robotic actuator, which was the result of a collaborative effort with our colleagues at the Hamlyn Centre.
Day two of Photonics West: Dr Mike Hughes presented in the same Endoscopic Microscopy conference some interesting work done with PDRA Chai Middidodi in a talk titled Towards high speed needle microscopy through a multimode fiber by single pixel imaging. Chai couldn’t be there in person as he had just become a father – our congratulations to him and his family!
The OCT poster session attracted a significant amount of interest!
Later that same day, Prof Adrian Podoleanu and Dr Manuel Marques attended the Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine conference poster session, where three AOG posters were presented: Manuel’s poster on long range OCT imaging enabled by CMSI, Long axial range swept-source OCT instrument enhanced by complex master-slave processing (related with the paper published in OSA Continuum late last year), a poster titled Evaluation of a commercial-grade camera for line field spectral-domain optical coherence tomography, based on research carried out by former Erasmus+ student Mathis Fauchart on the implementation of a line-field OCT system employing a commercial-grade camera, and a poster on utilising the phase in CMSI titled Employing the phase in master slave interferometry, presented by Prof Podoleanu. The poster session was very busy, with the posters on CMSI attracting great interest!
Andy presenting his talk in the Endoscopy conference.
PhD student Andy Thrapp completed the AOG presentation schedule on day three with his very interesting and engaging talk on Motion compensation in structured illumination fluorescence endomicroscopy. Prof Podoleanu chaired another session, Ophthalmology II, on Tuesday, this time in the main OCT conference.
The post-conference social activities are also part of the experience! 😀
In addition to the talks and posters contributed by the AOG, there were also a number of talks from collaborators acknowledging AOG members, namely those stemming from the long-standing collaboration with DTU and the ShapeOCT project with Prof Ole Bang. Mikkel Jensen and Christian Petersen both presented work on supercontinuum developments in the mid-IR region, which has culminated in the development of an OCT system which can actually work in that wavelength range with reasonable imaging speed. More details on this research can be found on the recently published Nature: Light, Science and Applications and JOSA B papers.
Selfie time after the posters have been put up!
Overall, the conference was of significant value to all AOG members who attended, considering the range of talks attended, the networking an event like this provides, and not forgetting the enormous product and company expo where new ideas may be forged. And now that the jet lag is (mostly) over, it is time to get back to the lab and resume our research with a refreshed gusto!