FIP Seminar: Fourier Light Field Imaging for High Speed, 3D Analysis in the Mesoscale Regime

As computational speed and power accelerate, there is an increasing drive to use these advances to study system level dynamics. In biological and biomedical sciences, this includes the study of microscopic phenomena happening over macroscale volumes: a regime defined as “mesoscale". While we increasingly have the computational resources to model and analyze mesoscale phenomena, we lack the imaging tools necessary to capture data at this scale, as imaging technologies have historically been targeted for either the micro-scale or macro-scale regimes. In this talk, we present two systems which utilize Fourier Light Field Imaging to perform high-speed, 3D imaging in the mesoscale regime. First, our Fourier Light Field Multiview Stereoscope (FiLM-Scope) simultaneously acquires 48 high resolution, multi-perspective images of a 3 cm x 3 cm field-of-view. Alongside a self-supervised machine learning algorithm, this system can provide nearly isotropic resolution in all three dimensions, down to 20 um, to improve 3D visualization in microsurgical settings. The second system is our Ultra-high Speed Fourier Light Field Mesoscope (US-FLFM), which combines Fourier Light Field Imaging with an ultra-high speed camera to provide multi-perspective videos of a ~3x3mm area at over 100kHz frame rates. We are using this system to study energy flow in the exoskeletons of snapping trap jaw ants. Taken together, these systems demonstrate how Fourier Light Field imaging at the mesoscale can improve how we study systems-level biology.

 

 Clare Cook is a 4th year PhD student in the Computational Optics Lab under Dr. Roarke Horstmeyer, where her work focuses on the development of systems and algorithms for single snapshot 3D imaging. Outside of lab, she enjoys any opportunity to be outside, especially running, hiking, and rock-climbing.