Optical Imaging: Applications to Biology and Medicine Organizer(s): Dorothea Becker, Scott E. Fraser and Daniel L. Farkas Date: February 11 - 16, 2003
Location: Taos Convention Center (meeting only), Taos, NM, USARecent advances in optical imaging have opened new avenues for dynamically visualizing, recording, and quantitating in living systems, genetic, developmental, and physiologic changes that cannot be captured by conventional light microscopy or traditional medical imaging methods. In cellular and developmental biology, neuroscience, malignant and non-malignant human diseases, and tissue engineering, it has become increasingly clear that new approaches have to be pursued to gain insights into complex patterns of gene expression, regulation, and interaction to better understand mechanisms. Given its features (spatial, temporal and intensity range, wavelength, polarization, and coherence), light is well suited to study in vivo and in real time, complex or systemic processes that cannot be addressed in vitro. By combining molecular specificity, gene targeting, and advanced optical imaging, it has become possible to study development, gene functions, and disease processes in living animal models. In addition to real-time, tomographic 3-D fluorescence and diffuse optical imaging, techniques such as confocal and multi-photon scanning fluorescence microscopy, bioluminescence, spectral imaging and optical coherence tomography are beginning to find their way into the clinic as noninvasive diagnostic tools for early detection and improved monitoring of disease. The overall objective of the symposium is to demonstrate how newly developed modalities in optical imaging can be used to address central biological questions with high specificity and spatio-temporal resolution. Rather than focusing merely on technological issues, the symposium will present the science that motivated and benefited from a given technical advance. This tight coupling will allow the participants to fully appreciate both the costs and benefits of each approach. In addition, the symposium will bring together acknowledged leaders in the field of optical imaging with scientists and clinicians with relevant research problems in order to foster collaborations that will lead to novel interdisciplinary approaches to biological and medical questions. By reviewing exciting new developments in advanced optical imaging, the symposium will serve as a forum to demonstrate its present and future applications to important areas of science and medicine, and define future directions in these areas. Discounted Abstract Deadline: October 10 2002 Discounted Registration Deadline: December 11 2002 We gratefully acknowledge additional support for this conference from:  |