Novel acquisition and computation in vibrational spectroscopic imaging

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Prof. Rohit Bhargava and his interdisciplinary team at the University of Illinois are supported by the Chemical Measurement and Imaging Program in the Division of Chemistry to develope comprehensive and innovative methods for extracting knowledge from chemical imaging (CI) by (i) improving CI data both in time (by compressed sensing) and in signal-to-noise ratio (by noise reduction); (ii) developing novel data analysis algorithms that synergistically process spatial and spectral information; and (iii) extracting information about complex patterns and natural interactions that cannot be discerned currently by examination of structure alone. The approaches are being optimized on existing FT-IR and Raman imaging systems, and applied to study structure evolution in complex human tissues during malignant transformation. Imaging has traditionally focused on visualizing structure. This project broadly focuses on effectively visualizing the chemistry of materials by enhancing theory and computation in the emerging area of CI. The data enhancement approaches developed in this project will be broadly applicable to multiple analytical techniques and to all fields of application. Hence, the project is expected to widely accelerate scientific discovery and technological progress in, for example, materials science (e.g. in polymer composites), biological sciences (e.g. in lethal cancer transformation), and forensics (e.g. detecting prints). The developed tools and educational activities will enhance infrastructure and help build the national and international CI community. Tools and dissemination proposed here will help build partnerships between CI, computational, and biomedical scientists - allowing for rapid dissemination of results to industry and other practitioners. The project will train a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students in cross-disciplinary science, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, and computing. Underrepresented groups will be involved and nurtured into this emerging area by sustained mentoring. Finally, the developed techniques are expected to be translated to commercial instruments, contributing to widespread use.