Fast optical wavefront engineering for controlling light propagation in dynamic turbid media

Abstract

While propagating inside the strongly scattering biological tissue, photons lose their incident directions beyond one transport mean free path (TMFP, [Formula: see text]1 millimeter (mm)), which makes it challenging to achieve optical focusing or clear imaging deep inside tissue. By manipulating many degrees of the incident optical wavefront, the latest optical wavefront engineering (WFE) technology compensates the wavefront distortions caused by the scattering media and thus is toward breaking this physical limit, bringing bright perspective to many applications deep inside tissue, e.g., high resolution functional/molecular imaging, optical excitation (optogenetics) and optical tweezers. However, inside the dynamic turbid media such as the biological tissue, the wavefront distortion is a fast and continuously changing process whose decorrelation rate is on timescales from milliseconds (ms) to microseconds ([Formula: see text]s), or even faster. This requires that the WFE technology should be capable of beating this rapid process. In this review, we discuss the major challenges faced by the WFE technology due to the fast decorrelation of dynamic turbid media such as living tissue when achieving light focusing/imaging and summarize the research progress achieved to date to overcome these challenges.