{"id":150194,"date":"2024-03-18T15:41:33","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T19:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=150194"},"modified":"2024-03-28T12:48:31","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T16:48:31","slug":"bringing-the-brain-into-focus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2024\/03\/18\/bringing-the-brain-into-focus\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing the Brain Into Focus"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Lea Rivel<\/em><\/p>\n

Assistant Professor Tianyu Wang (ECE)<\/a> has received a new grant from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative\u00a0 for a collaborative project on multi-photon microscopy, a technology used for deep-tissue imaging.<\/span><\/p>\n

The project, \u201cCorrelation Engineering for Deep Multiphoton Microscopy,\u201d funded by a $2.5M CZI Deep Tissue Imaging Phase 2 grant, is a collaboration with researchers from Yale and Cornell.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The project focuses on developing a new type of light source that will substantially enhance the probability of nonlinear fluorescence excitation during the imaging process of multi-photon microscopy. This improved signal will increase both speed and imaging depth, enabling novel but currently challenging experiments such as \u201cdirect imaging of the voltage of thousands of neurons within an entire neural circuit and visualizing the communication among numerous neurons via neurotransmitters,\u201d says Wang. To achieve this goal, researchers will use AI tools to search for the optimal excitation pathway for various fluorescent molecules, improving their brightness without modifying their structure. If successful, the new light source will enable researchers to capture faster dynamics within deeper sites for <\/span>in vivo<\/span><\/i> tissue imaging, resulting in some of the most detailed, high-quality data that has ever been gathered on activity deep within the brain.<\/span><\/p>\n

Phase 2 of the <\/span>CZI\u2019s Deep Tissue Imaging program<\/span><\/a> aims to gain a deeper mechanistic understanding of biological systems by visualizing and measuring them across biological scales and in context. Their grant program \u2014 accepting four year projects \u2014 seeks to advance the field of deep tissue imaging by \u201cdriving development of imaging technology focused on obtaining cellular resolution readouts within complex living organisms.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Professor Tianyu Wang is the newest member of the ECE faculty as of January 2024. Wang was awarded the Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2023. In 2017, he won SPIE Photonic West\u2019s JenLab Young Investigator Award for his work on developing the technique of three-photon calcium imaging. His areas of interest include physics-inspired computing, biomedical optics, optical information processing, and A.I. for science. He earned his PhD from Cornell University in 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Tianyu Wang receives grant from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative for reinventing a quantum-inspired light source to improve deep-tissue imaging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18241,"featured_media":150192,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,385,317,977,240,907,1173],"tags":[954,1191,1190,866,1189,1125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150194"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150470,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150194\/revisions\/150470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}