Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University

Measuring light where it has already scattered

The Biomedical Optics and Imaging Lab (BOIL) builds noninvasive optical instruments that quantify blood flow, oxygenation and metabolism in living tissue, rapidly and without contrast agents. The work runs from the optical bench to the bedside, across neuromonitoring, cancer imaging and image guided therapy.

Research Join the lab

What we work on

Neurovascular monitoring

Time gated and time domain diffuse correlation spectroscopy, speckle contrast optical spectroscopy and functional near infrared spectroscopy, used to track cerebral blood flow and low frequency oscillations continuously at the bedside in traumatic brain injury and disorders of consciousness.

Cancer imaging and therapy

Quantitative fluorescence and spatial frequency domain imaging through a laparoscope, used to map optical properties, measure absolute drug concentration and monitor light triggered drug release during chemophototherapy in ovarian cancer models.

Optical instrumentation

Detectors, electronics and firmware built in house, including single photon avalanche diode arrays, superconducting nanowire detectors and field programmable gate array correlators that bring the analysis on chip and make real time measurement possible.

Tissue constructs and drug delivery

Optical readouts applied to engineered tissue constructs and to targeted drug delivery systems, where the same quantitative methods report on the state of a construct or on how much drug has reached the target.

How we approach it

Optical methods carry a hard constraint. Light entering tissue scatters many times before it comes back out, so the measurement has to be recovered from photons that have lost any simple relationship to where they went. Most of the work in this lab is about turning that recovered signal into a number a clinician or a biologist can act on, rather than into a picture alone.

That leads to 3 recurring commitments. Measurements are quantitative, so a value means the same thing on 2 different days and in 2 different people. They are made without contrast agents, which keeps them repeatable and removes the regulatory and safety burden of an injected dye. And the instruments are built to be portable and multimodal, because a device that cannot be wheeled to a patient does not get used on one.

Read about the current projects