Peter T. So
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Imaging cytometry takes pictures of many cells very quickly, so researchers can measure cell shape and structure. It is used to detect rare cells and to screen drugs.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Physics
- Topics
imaging cytometry
quantitative phase microscopy
compressive imaging
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Design optical compression schemes for differentiable microscopy by training front-end optics and the decompression algorithm together as one neural-network auto-encoder.
- Fabricate visible-light optical diffractive networks, layered light-bending structures, with nanometer-scale precision using Implosion Fabrication.
- Build and test high-throughput quantitative phase imaging cytometers powered by these diffractive optics, targeting roughly a hundredfold gain in voxel throughput.
More about the research
Today its speed is often limited by electronics: cameras and data links cannot carry images fast enough. One fix is to compress the image optically, before it reaches the detector, so more information passes through the bottleneck. This project builds microscopes whose lenses do part of the computing.
Why it matters
Faster imaging cytometry could speed tasks such as finding rare cells and screening drugs, where throughput limits how many cells can be examined. Cheap, customizable nano-optics made by Implosion Fabrication could let imaging systems compress images in light itself, potentially improving microscope throughput by about two orders of magnitude.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Aydogan Ozcan
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Design diffractive optical networks, stacks of deep-learning-optimized, sub-wavelength-patterned layers, that undo skin scattering and absorption to reconstruct images of objects beneath tissue in near-infrared light.
Rosario Porras-Aguilar
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Engineering·Early-career
Build a mathematical framework for wavefront shaping, the control of light's phase front, that selectively enhances the spatial frequencies carrying information about a feature's size, shape, and orientation while suppressing background from small-angle scatter.
Roberto Paiella
Boston University, MA·Engineering
Design and fabricate dielectric metasurfaces on commercial CMOS sensor arrays to build a phase-imaging meta-sensor (PIMS) array that reconstructs optical phase quantitatively in a single shot.
The school
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 25 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 692 research doctorates a year.
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