By James Van Howe
This post originally appeared on Jim’s Cleo Blog and is reproduced with permission from its author.
Just this past Tuesday, U.S. president, Barack Obama, invoked science and innovation in the State-of-the-Union-Address, as the silver bullet to heal an ailing U.S. economy and crumbling infrastructure. U.S. statesmen and -women alike got up out of their seats repeatedly to give applause for science. Specifically, Mr. Obama, cited three optics-related areas of research to which he will try to allocate U.S. federal funding: 1) biomedical research, 2) information technology, and 3) clean-energy technology. Mr. Obama proposed to send a budget to congress in the next few weeks that would help the U.S. “…reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race.” To that aim, CLEO will be hosting contributed papers in these three areas, and if Mr. Obama is successful in his budget requests, perhaps we will be seeing more submissions and exhibitions in these fields in the near-future.
Entire sessions devoted to Obama’s first research area, biomedical research, can be found under two-topic categories CLEO:Applications and Technology 1: Biomedical and CLEO: Science and Innovation10: Biophotonics and Optofluidics. The former will contain research already in the clinical-trial stage, whereas the latter will hold emerging research that is “pre-pilot.” One of the many sub-categories in these topics includes optical biopsy. The goal of optical biopsy is to diagnose tissue during a medical procedure in vivo with photons rather than extracting it invasively with a knife (to be analyzed later in a lab). This is the aim of many biomedical techniques such as diffuse optical tomography (DOT), optical coherence tomography (OCT), and multiphoton microscopy (MPM). These techniques use light in clever ways to extract information from deep inside tissue which typically scatters away all the light you want. Be sure to attend these sessions for the latest on these and other emerging biomedical techniques.
Sessions for Mr. Obama’s second research area, information technology, can be found …for the full original post, click here.
Posted: 30 January 2011 by
James Van Howe
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