Li Lab biophotonics imaging technology published in PNAS

BME Professor Xingde Li, his group members YY Zhang, K Murari, JF Xi, and other collaborators at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Corning Inc., have published a study in PNAS.

The paper reports on the recent breakthrough in the development of a fiber-optic scanning SHG endomicroscopy technology and one of its many applications, assessment of cervical tissue remodeling.

The reported endomicroscope can perform all the basic functions of an advanced bench-top nonlinear optical microscope but with an amazingly small footprint (i.e. 2 mm in diameter), enabling a variety of applications of advanced microscopy in vivo. In the paper, the authors demonstrated the utility of the endomicroscopy technology for quantitatively assessing/staging collagen fiber network remodeling in a nondisruptive and real time fashion. The findings suggest a potential solution for predicting preterm birth, the morbidity and mortality of which influences about 0.5 million newborns each year in the U.S. alone.