Two Ph.D. students, Mr. WEN Chenyang and Miss CHANG Yina, from the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering under the supervision of Pro. CHEN Shih-Chi, won the student poster session competition in the SPIE International Symposium on SPIE BiOS, part of the SPIE Photonics West 2017 event. The competition was held on 28 January – 2 February 2017 in San Francisco, California, USA.

In the symposium, the MAE participants presented a sync-free light sheet microscope (LSM) based on a static phase mask that eliminates the need of coupling the detection plane, thus enabling high-speed volumetric imaging that is only limited by the speed of cameras e.g. ~1 kHz. In the sync-free design, the emission signals are first guided to the back of a galvanometric mirror, which laterally scans the emissions across a 2-D phase mask, converting it to axial scanning that automatically compensates for the focal shifts in the detection optics. The new method realizes a compact LSM for high-speed 3-D imaging that may find important applications in in vivo biological imaging