Lens-Free Computational Microscopy for Disease Diagnosis

Speaker: Yibo Zhang
Affiliation: Ph.D. Candidate - UCLA

Abstract:  The optical microscope has served as a workhorse for the medical community for hundreds of years and has been one of the gold standards for the diagnosis of numerous diseases. However, the high cost and bulkiness of lens-based microscopes largely restrict them to advanced imaging labs in centralized clinics; whereas the limited throughput increases the time and labor for the diagnostician to reach a diagnosis, which in turn increases the cost of diagnosis.

In my dissertation, a novel imaging modality, namely lens-free computational microscopy, and the techniques and methods that enable its applications to medical diagnostic tasks will be introduced. With no lenses in the optical setup, the lens-free microscope directly captures defocused holographic patterns of the sample using an optoelectronic image sensor, and computationally recovers the sample’s image with image reconstruction algorithms.  This unique design makes the lens-free microscope extremely cost-effective, wide-field, robust and compact.  Centered around lens-free microscopy, three application domains are covered in my dissertation: bright-field pathology slide imaging for cancer diagnosis (pathology), polarized microscopy for gout/pseudogout diagnosis (rheumatology), and rapid screening of parasite infection in bodily fluids (microbiology).

Biography:  Yibo Zhang is a PhD candidate in Prof. Aydogan Ozcan’s Bio- and Nano-Photonics Group in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, UCLA.  Yibo received his BS degree from Electrical Engineering (EE) Department, Tsinghua University in China in 2013, and his MS degree from UCLA in 2015.  Yibo’s research focuses on computational microscopy and sensing for biomedical applications and disease diagnosis.  During his PhD research, Yibo has co-authored 21 journal publications in addition to numerous international conference presentations.

For more information, contact Prof. Aydogan Ozcan (ozcan@ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Oct 25, 2018
1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Location:
E-IV Tesla Room #53-125
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095