RESUMEN
Compound prism arrays are a powerful, yet underutilized, solution for producing high transmission and customized chromatic dispersion profiles over broad bandwidths, the quality of which is unobtainable with commercially available prisms or diffraction gratings. However, the computational complexity associated with designing these prism arrays presents a barrier to the widespread adoption of their use. Here we introduce customizable prism designer software that facilitates high-speed optimization of compound arrays guided by target specifications for chromatic dispersion linearity and detector geometry. Information theory is utilized such that target parameters can be easily modified through user input to efficiently simulate a broad range of possible prism array designs. We demonstrate the capabilities of the designer software to simulate new prism array designs for multiplexed, hyperspectral microscopy that achieve chromatic dispersion linearity and a 70-90% light transmission over a significant portion of the visible wavelength range (500-820 nm). The designer software is applicable to many optical spectroscopy and spectral microscopy applications-with varying requirements for spectral resolution, light ray deviation, and physical size-that are photon-starved and for which the enhanced transmission of refraction versus diffraction warrants custom optical designs.
RESUMEN
Infant hydrocephalus poses a severe global health burden; 80% of cases occur in the developing world where patients have limited access to neurosurgical care. Surgical treatment combining endoscopic third ventriculostomy and choroid plexus cauterization (ETV/CPC), first practiced at CURE Children's Hospital of Uganda (CCHU), is as effective as standard ventriculoperitoneal shunt (VPS) placement while requiring fewer resources and less post-operative care. Although treatment focuses on controlling ventricle size, this has little association with treatment failure or long-term outcome. This study aims to monitor the progression of hydrocephalus and treatment response, and investigate the association between cerebral physiology, brain growth, and neurodevelopmental outcomes following surgery. We will enroll 300 infants admitted to CCHU for treatment. All patients will receive pre/post-operative measurements of cerebral tissue oxygenation (SO2), cerebral blood flow (CBF), and cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen consumption (CMRO2) using frequency-domain near-infrared combined with diffuse correlation spectroscopies (FDNIRS-DCS). Infants will also receive brain imaging, to monitor tissue/ventricle volume, and neurodevelopmental assessments until two years of age. This study will provide a foundation for implementing cerebral physiological monitoring to establish evidence-based guidelines for hydrocephalus treatment. This paper outlines the protocol, clinical workflow, data management, and analysis plan of this international, multi-center trial.
RESUMEN
Live-subject microscopies, including microendoscopy and other related technologies, offer promise for basic biology research as well as the optical biopsy of disease in the clinic. However, cellular resolution generally comes with the trade-off of a microscopic field-of-view. Microimage mosaicking enables stitching many small scenes together to aid visualization, quantitative interpretation, and mapping of microscale features, for example, to guide surgical intervention. The development of hyperspectral and multispectral systems for biomedical applications provides motivation for adapting mosaicking algorithms to process a number of simultaneous spectral channels. We present an algorithm that mosaics multichannel video by correlating channels of consecutive frames as a basis for efficiently calculating image alignments. We characterize the noise tolerance of the algorithm by using simulated video with known ground-truth alignments to quantify mosaicking accuracy and speed, showing that multiplexed molecular imaging enhances mosaic accuracy by leveraging observations of distinct molecular constituents to inform frame alignment. A simple mathematical model is introduced to characterize the noise suppression provided by a given group of spectral channels, thus predicting the performance of selected subsets of data channels in order to balance mosaic computation accuracy and speed. The characteristic noise tolerance of a given number of channels is shown to improve through selection of an optimal subset of channels that maximizes this model. We also demonstrate that the multichannel algorithm produces higher quality mosaics than the analogous single-channel methods in an empirical test case. To compensate for the increased data rate of hyperspectral video compared to single-channel systems, we employ parallel processing via GPUs to alleviate computational bottlenecks and to achieve real-time mosaicking even for video-rate multichannel systems anticipated in the future. This implementation paves the way for real-time multichannel mosaicking to accompany next-generation hyperspectral and multispectral video microscopy.
