Confocal wavefront shaping using fluorescence feedback

My work addresses a fundamental challenge in biomedical imaging: when we try to look inside biological tissue, light gets scattered, and the resulting images become blurred and noisy. The goal of this work is to overcome this limitation using wavefront shaping, which allows us to control how light propagates through complex media. The work is built around three main contributions. First, we developed a very fast method for wavefront shaping that can quickly focus light and image regions behind scattering layers, but it is limited to high signal-to-noise conditions and to very sparse scenes. Second, we introduced a confocal wavefront-shaping approach that works with weak biological signals, such as fluorescence from neurons, enabling reliable focusing and imaging even in noisy and dense samples. Third, we extended this idea into a parallel and large-scale system, where many regions are processed simultaneously, allowing faster imaging over much larger areas. Overall, this work shows that, instead of being fundamentally blocked by scattering, we can actively shape the light to recover meaningful structural information from deep inside biological tissue.

Ph.D. student Under the supervision of Prof. Anat Levin.