Bioengineers aim for 'street-level' view of the brain

To better understand the brain, a group of bioengineers from Lehigh University are using space-division multiplexing optical coherence tomography (SDM-OCT) to potentially map the brain.

Lead researchers of this study, Chao Zhou, assistant professor of bioengineering at Lehigh University, and Yevgeny Berdichevsky, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Lehigh and principal investigator in the Neural Engineering Labwere, were awarded a grant by the National Institutes of Health "to explore the adaptation of OCT to achieve large-scale imaging of neural activity at the single cell level—a potential game-changer in brain imaging."

The study using SDM-OCT has the possibility of providing a crucial "street-level" view of the brain needed to advance the understanding of brain function by researchers.