Summary: Early diagnostics of diseases is the key to treatment, cure, and fatality prevention. Various biomedical sensors are available or being developed to achieve early disease diagnostics with non-invasive or minimally invasive techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasonic imaging, X-ray imaging, CT scan, optical coherent tomography (OCT), endoscopy, microscopy, spectroscopy, etc. Among these techniques, optical technologies, including various microscopy and spectroscopy approaches, provide the possibility to observe a large range of objects, from organs, cells, to molecules, with fast (ideally real-time) response and high spatial and spectral resolutions. In addition, to make the diagnostic tests of diseases, such as cancers, more accessible to the general public it is important to provide easy early diagnostic tools packaged as portable information devices. Such early diagnostics portable information devices must be highly sensitive, disease specific, reliable, inexpensive, easy to fabricate, fast, and compact.

This course will provide an overview of various optical biomedical sensors, including both imaging and spectroscopic techniques, and introduce some recent developments in biomedical sensors, such as nanoparticle surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and its application in compact molecular sensors. Specifically, the following topics will be discussed: interaction of light with tissues, cells, and molecules; bioimaging including optical microscopy, endoscopic imaging, fluorescence imaging, and optical tomography; spectroscopy including absorption spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy; optical fiber surface enhanced Raman probes for biomedical applications.