Email: francois.cote.29@ulaval.ca

Position: MScA – Biophotonics – Laval University
Academia: B.Eng – Physical engineering – Laval University
Advisor: Daniel Côté

Research Interests: Advanced technological developments in optics for medical imaging, Optic fibre probes used in neurophotonic microscopy, development of a new HiLo microscope.

A lot of work has been done in the past few years in neuroscience using optical physics to create new technologies for microscopy. For instance, higher resolution imaging is important for biologists to get more details from their samples. But currently, most techniques are expensive and are very slow, ie. a whole mouse brain usually takes more than 3 hours to image. Furthermore, sometimes the tissue is not in adequate conditioning for imaging throughout the entire sample (and unfortunately, we usually find this out after several hours of hard work).

My first project combines wide-field microscopy and HiLo techniques to tackle these issues and provide a fast imaging system at a much lower cost. Using our wide-field technique we can image a plane of the entire mouse brain, enabling very high speed volumetric imaging, decreasing whole brain imaging to as low as 5 minutes. We achieve wide-field optical sectioning using a robust version of HiLo imaging which eliminates light coming from the out-of-focus planes.

My second project consists of a fibre microscope for deep brain imaging. A fibre probe has been designed in our group to image tissue through a normal singlemode optical fibre, using perpendicular illumination. A scanning system is then used to create an image of the tissue in a specific region. Using this technique we can image deep brain structures in animals with very low invasiveness to provide new information about neurodegenerative diseases. Moreover, with further iterations, we hope to use the technique for  optical guidance in human neurosurgery.