Facility Details

The Biomedical Imaging Group is an interdisciplinary team of engineers and scientists, representing the fields of cell biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science, that combine their expertise in areas such as microscopy, data management, lasers, optoelectronics, applied mathematics, image and signal processing, computer graphics, computer vision, statistics, software engineering, and biophysics, to develop imaging approaches for cell biology.

Since its establishment in the early 1980s, it has been a pioneer in high-resolution 3-D imaging using wide-field fluorescence microscopy together with digital image deconvolution, and image visualization and quantitative analysis techniques, especially as applied to the statistical analysis of images to determine co-localization of fluorescence markers inside cells.

Research in this lab is concerned with both the development and the application of light microscopy and imaging in cell biology and biophysics. Some driving problems include imaging the molecular components driving endocytosis and exocytosis/secretion in various cell types, and the imaging of intracellular calcium signaling in excitable cells such as smooth muscle cells, chromaffin cells, and neurons.

As an example of our achievements, we have developed the TESM microscope that combines Total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) with Epi-fluorescence Structured illumination to provide new views of trafficking in the near-plasma membrane domain of cells. We have a unique, custom-built, ultra-high-speed microscope system for imaging the dynamics of intracellular calcium channel events, called "calcium sparks", that are being found to regulate an expanding array of cellular processes. We have a two-photon fluorescence microscope for looking deep inside tissue, completing the range from molecule to organism. Areas of ongoing technology research include high-speed, high-resolution imaging of live cells and tissues, novel image processing approaches, high-performance computing, and computer graphics, with an emphasis on developing open-source tools for the research community.