A team of researchers has developed a modified version of two-photon imaging that can scan deeper within tissue and perform the imaging much faster than previously possible.

Two-photon imaging is also time-consuming, as it usually requires scanning individual pixels one at a time. A team of MIT and Harvard University researchers has now developed a modified version of two-photon imaging that can image deeper within tissue and perform the imaging much more quickly than what was previously possible.

This kind of imaging could allow scientists to more rapidly obtain high-resolution images of structures such as blood vessels and individual neurons within the brain, the researchers say.

«By modifying the laser beam coming into the tissue, we showed that we can go deeper and we can do finer imaging than the previous techniques,» says Murat Yildirim, an MIT research scientist and one of the authors of the new study.

MIT graduate student Cheng Zheng and former postdoc Jong Kang Park are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Science Advances. Dushan N. Wadduwage, a former MIT postdoc who is now a John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow in Imaging at the Center for Advanced Imaging at Harvard University, is the paper’s senior author. Other authors include Josiah Boivin, an MIT postdoc; Yi Xue, a former MIT graduate student; Mriganka Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience at MIT; and Peter So, an MIT professor of mechanical engineering and of biological engineering.

Deep imaging

Two-photon microscopy works by shining an intense beam of near-infrared light onto a single point within a sample, inducing simultaneous absorption of two photons at the focal point, where the intensity is the highest. This long-wavelength, low-energy light can penetrate deeper into tissue without damaging it, allowing for imaging below the surface.

Story Source: Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original written by Anne Trafton. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.