Hans-Ulrich Dodt - Please note new date and time

Institute of Solid State Electronics, Vienna

Nearly Isotropic 3D-Imaging of Mouse Brains, Fly Brains and Human Tumors with Light Sheets Beyond the Diffraction Limit

4:00 pm, Wednesday 17 April 2019

Location: Oxford Martin School, 34 Broad Street, Oxford

Abstract:  Optics involving extremely long, thin sheets of light and a vastly increased Rayleigh range (achieved by breaking the diffraction limit of light sheets of low numerical aperture) allow an elegant application of ultramicroscopy to large samples, such as whole mouse brains or Drosophila. Due to the extremely low divergence of the light sheets, brains can be reconstructed from a single stack of optical sections with nearly isotropic resolution that reaches the single-spine level at higher magnification. Ultramicroscopy can be applied to samples of ever-increasing size. Large pieces of human tumors that have been cleared and stained by a new superfast clearing procedure can be imaged intraoperatively in three dimensions. Optically identified malignancies were subsequently confirmed by standard histological sectioning. We predict that ultramicroscopy of cleared tumors will play an increasingly important role in pathological diagnostics.

Biography:   Hans-Ulrich Dodt studied medicine and physics at the Universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg.  He was a postdoctoral fellow with Dieter Lux at the Max-Planck-Institute of Psychiatry and worked with Walter Zieglgänsberger on the development of infrared videomicroscopy. As a group leader in Munich, he began work on solvent-based tissue clearing methods in combination with light-sheet microscopy. In 2007 he was appointed to a Professorship of Bioelectronics at the Technical University of Vienna, where he holds a joint appointment at the Center for Brain Science of the Medical University