Duke Institute for Brain Sciences

Biophotonics is concerned with the application of cutting-edge optoelectronic technologies to problems in the biomedical sciences. Our research centers on the application of optical technologies for non-invasive, high-resolution imaging and sensing in living biological tissues. Much of this work centers on the development of technology of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), a relatively new medical imaging modality which uses optical radiation (light) to noninvasively image living cells and tissues with resolution approaching the wavelength of light. Our work in neural tissues includes imaging of the living intact retina with micrometer-scale resolution for clinical and research studies. We have also developed a novel extension of OCT which permits profiling of individual cell membranes with nanosecond spatial and millisecond temporal resolution. We are applying this technique for noninvasive optical monitoring of excitation in individual nerve cells and isolated retina preparations.

Ph.D., MIT, 1991

S.M., MIT, 1988

S.B., MIT, 1986

M. Stopa, B.A. Bower, E. Davies, J.A. Izatt, and C.A. Toth, “Correlation of Pathologic Features in Spectral Domain OCT Imaging with Conventional Retinal Studies,” Retina 28:298-308, 2008.

A.K. Ellerbee, T.L. Creazzo, and J.A. Izatt, “Investigating nanoscale cellular dynamics with cross-sectional spectral domain phase microscopy,” Optics Express 13:8115-8124, 2007.

B.A. Bower, M. Zhao, R.J. Zawadzki, J.A. Izatt, “Real-Time Spectral Domain Doppler Optical Coherence Tomography and Investigation of Human Retinal Vessel Autoregulation,” Journal of Biomedical Optics 12:041214, 2007.