Ultrathin 3D-printed Imaging Devices
Abstract
Preclinical studies and clinical diagnostics increasingly rely on optical techniques to visualize internal
organs. Miniaturised catheters or endoscopes are necessary for imaging small and/or delicate
arteries. However, current lens fabrication methods limit the performance of these ultrathin devices,
resulting in a poor combination of resolution, depth of focus and multimodal imaging capability.
This talk will introduce her latest research to address these combined challenges. In particular, she
has utilized 3D micro-printing technology to fabricate lenses, with a diameter of less than 350 μm,
directly onto an optical fiber to achieve freeform designs for 1) aberration-corrected optical coherence
tomography (OCT), 2) Bessel beam OCT, and 3) highly-sensitive multimodal fluorescence+OCT
imaging in vivo.
Biography
Dr. Jiawen Li is a Fellow of L’Oréal-UNESCO, National Heart Foundation and NHMRC, and a Senior
Lecturer at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the University of Adelaide. She received
her Bachelor’s degree in Optical Engineering from Zhejiang University (China) in 2010, and her PhD
degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine (USA) in 2015.
Since finishing her PhD, Dr. Li has secured >$2 million research funding as the lead chief/principal
investigator and won numerous prestigious awards/honours (including national Superstar of STEM,
Australian and New Zealand Optical Society Geoff Opat Early Career Researcher Prize, Heart
Foundation Paul Korner Innovation Award, Young Tall Poppy Science Award, etc.). Dr Li’s research
focuses on multimodal imaging, ultrathin endoscopes, optical sensing, 3D micro-printing, and optical
coherence tomography.