Optical bioimaging and neuroimaging: from whole-body inspection to brain sensing.

Methods of optical bioimaging and neuroimaging are rapidly evolving and penetrate both to experimental laboratories and clinics. Among their advantages are non-invasiveness and abilities varying from multiscale image acquisition to functional real-time imaging. This Special Issue presents a collection of papers contributed by the leading groups in bioand neuroimaging depicting their state-of-the-art results discussed at “Optical Bioimaging” and “Neuroimaging and Neurodynamics” Conferences being parts of the Second International Symposium “Topical Problems of Biophotonics – 2009”. The papers cover a wide spectrum of techniques from optical diffuse tomography [Maslennikova, pp. 743–751] and optical coherence tomography [Kirillin, pp. 752–758] to multiphoton [König, pp. 759– 773], FRET [Rusanov, pp. 774–783] and second harmonic generation imaging [Rama, pp. 784–790] while the imaging scale varies from whole body [Maslennikova] through organ level [Kirillin] to subcellular [Rama] and molecular [König, Rusanov] imaging. The Symposium was held in July 2009 by the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences together with the Nizhny Novgorod Medical Academy, the University of Nizhny Novgorod, Gycom Ltd. and the Government of Nizhny Novgorod Region. About 250 participants from around the world exchanged their views on the recent developments in this fascinating field of science. The Symposium included four parallel topical conferences “Optical Bioimaging”, “Nanobiophotonics”, “Neuroimaging and Neurodynamics” and “Terahertz Diagnostics and Treatment”. As is seen from the titles, the symposium has covered a broad spectrum of topics. The range of issues addressed at the meeting was explicitly represented by the plenary talks given by Paras Prassad (USA), Vladislav Panchenko (Russia), Bruce Tromberg (USA), Antoine Triller (France), Xi-Cheng Zhang (USA), Hiro-o Hamaguchi (Japan), Svyatoslav Medvedev (Russia), Claude Boccara (France), Derek Abbott (Australia), and Matthew Larkum (Switzerland). The conference in optical bioimaging reviewed state-of-the-art in optical coherence tomography, multiphoton fluorescence microscopy, optical diffuse tomography, diffuse fluorescence tomography, PDT, biophotonics methods for medicine of the future. The main topics of the neuroimaging conference were new approaches to functional brain imaging, optical neuroimaging, modeling of neurons and synapses in functional networks and modeling of system level phenomena including activity patterns, synchronization and neural control.