PIPages
Labs

Aydogan Ozcan

University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Biomedical Engineering

Seeing inside the body usually means bulky, expensive equipment. Skin scatters and absorbs light, which blurs any image of the blood vessels and cells beneath it.

Fields

Biomedical Engineering

Engineering

Physics

Topics

diffractive optical networks

diffractive deep neural networks

computational imaging

Grants
1 known grant, through Apr 2027

What they work on

  1. 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.
  2. Fabricate the diffractive layers by two-photon polymerization, a high-precision laser 3D printing technique, and integrate them with an imager chip.
  3. Test imaging and sensing performance through skin phantoms integrated with microfluidic channels that simulate blood flow, as a basis for later cell counting in animals.

More about the research

A thin, wearable device that could see through skin without electrical power for computing could make tasks like counting blood cells or spotting infections far more practical and affordable.

Why it matters

Compact, low-cost optical devices that image through skin could enable wearable diagnostics. Possible uses include counting blood cells, detecting infections or bacteria beneath the skin, and reading implanted optical sensors. Making such devices cheaper and smaller could widen access to monitoring that now requires large laboratory instruments.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

EAGER: Imaging and sensing through the skin using diffractive networks

NSF · May 2025 – Apr 2027

Closest labs

Peter T. So

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Biomedical Engineering

Design optical compression schemes for differentiable microscopy by training front-end optics and the decompression algorithm together as one neural-network auto-encoder.

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.

Jinwei Ye

George Mason University, VA·Computer Science·Early-career

Model how the polarization of light changes when it reflects off complex surfaces, using physics-based layered material models and a shared high-precision polarimetric reflectance dataset.

The school

University of California-Los Angeles: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 803 research doctorates a year.

More about University of California-Los Angeles

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