High-resolution functional optical imaging of living tissues

Laminar optical tomography (LOT) is an optical imaging technique capable of imaging absorption and fluorescence contrast in-vivo to depths of >2mm with 100-200 micron resolution. LOT has been used to image the living brain in experiments to investigate the hemodynamic response in rat cortex during forepaw stimulus. We show that using LOT, it is possible to resolve the contributions of each vascular compartment to the ensemble hemodynamic response. The LOT system will be described and its future application to other areas of medical imaging will be discussed