Wide-Field Functional Imaging (WiFI) is a new technology development project at the Beckman Laser Institute (BLI) for quantitative imaging of tissue structure and metabolism with scalable resolution and depth sectioning. WiFI combines principles of spatial frequency domain imaging (SFDI) with laser speckle imaging (LSI) – technologies which have been developed independently at the BLI over the past five years. The compatibility of these techniques from a hardware perspective and the complimentary information content provided by each method will allow simultaneous measurement of tissue blood flow, biochemical composition (i.e., oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin, water and lipid content), and molecular fluorescence in a single platform. Sufficient spatio-temporal resolution can be achieved to study both fast (i.e., ms timescale) and localized (i.e., tens of microns to mm) events at depths of several millimeters in thick tissues. The lab also focuses on technology advancement by investigating novel hardware advances and focusing on model and algorithm development. These methods are then applied for pre-clinical and clinical research applications, or essentially any setting where quantitative subsurface metabolic imaging may be required. Some of our efforts are shown below.
