EAPSI: Implementation of Ultra-Fast Control to Advance Benchtop Nonlinear Imaging Systems for Clinical Imaging Viability

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Second harmonic generation (SHG) imaging, a nonlinear optical process in which photons effectively "combine", is a powerful diagnostic tool for visualizing and quantifying differences in collagen architecture in a wide range of diseases including cancer, fibrosis, connective tissue disorders and cardiovascular disease. Currently, all the imaging hardware and polarization devices of our imaging system are synchronized in an extremely inefficient way. This project takes advantage of profound expertise of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) programming in Professor Shean-Jen Chen?s laboratory at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan. Using FPGA programming, this projects aims for improving the speed and efficiency of the benchtop imaging platform for potential clinical use.The versatility of SHG imaging is such that it can be coupled with polarization techniques for detecting various collagen isoform distribution indicative of early disease onset. Our current imaging setup operates with the Olympus Fluoview 300 laser-scanning system mounted on an Olympus BX61 upright microscope coupled with various polarization optical components. The system offers precise, motion-free control of excitation polarization using a liquid crystal modulator (LCM) in the infinity space and emission polarization gating using a rotatable Glan-laser polarizer (GLP) on a motorized mount before the photomultiplier tube (PMT) detector. Currently, all of these polarization devices are synchronized using custom LabVIEW programs connected through a National Instruments BNC-2110 connector block that is inefficient and slow. To overcome these issues and progress our system to be more viable for potential endoscopic use, we wish to implement a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) using logic blocks to interconnect our DAQ boards and hardware with much more speed and efficiency. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan.