Getting under your skin: researchers peer inside tissue

Recently, Washington University at St. Louis researchers employed a novel holographic technique to see inside tissue. By recording what happens to scattered light emerging from tissue, the group was able to preserve information about the path the light traveled through the tissue and back-track to form images. This research lacked focus -- of the light that is -- and a Caltech study published today in Nature Communications does just that. The Caltech group expands on the previous work, using a unique interaction between acoustic vibrations from ultrasound and light used for imagine. The ultrasound will focus on a particular location in the tissue, and light that interacts with ultrasound vibrations will change color. By only back-tracking the path of the color-shifted light, the group is able to reconstruct images on a particular region within the tissue, as well as image at a greater depth.