The Biomedical Optics Symposium (BiOS) at SPIE Photonics West 2015 starts Saturday, February 7, and I'm looking forward to an action-packed week, beginning with a tour of the exhibit hall when it opens at noon on Saturday.
Then Saturday evening, I'll join the enthusiastic crowd at the Hot Topics plenary (7-9 pm), which will begin with presentation of SPIE's 2015 awards in biomedical optics. These awards include the Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award, which will honor Lihong Wang of Washington University in St Louis for "outstanding lifetime contributions" in the development and application of photoacoustics and photon transport modeling. His talk is titled "Photon-Phonon Synergy: Photoacoustic Tomography and Beyond."
Seven other speakers will then take the stage, three of them focused on cancer: Vadim Backman of Northwestern University will speak on cancer screening and nanoscale cytology; Paola Taroni of Politecnico di Milano (Italy) will explain optical assessment of collagen and breast cancer; and David Roberts of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will describe fluorescence-guided resection of intracranial tumors. The remaining talks will cover advances in imaging: Brett Bouma of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine will report on endoscopic OCT, Richard Rosen of the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary will describe adaptive optics for the retina, MIT's Peter So will report on nonlinear microscopy, and Rafael Yuste of Columbia University will describe simultaneous imaging of neural activity in 3D.
Then, I'll opt for some shuteye so my brain can encode all of that great information into longer-term memory. I think I'll need that.
