Fu-Jen Kao – författare

This text on contemporary optical systems is intended for optical researchers and engineers, graduate students and optical microscopists in the biological and biomedical sciences. In three sections, the book discusses high-aperture optical systems, nonlinear optical techniques, and various techniques that are finding new applications. The new second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to account for new advances in fluorescence imaging and diffractive optical lenses.

It has been four years since the publication of the ?rst edition of this book. During these four years optical imaging has advanced considerably. Nevertheless, when we were asked to compile a second edition of this book the ?rst question we asked was: are there any topics that were missed out from the ?rst edition? Even though there are a fairly large number of subjects that we could potentially have considered it was decided to extend the book by two new chapters. The ?rst one is on the use of di?ractive optical elements in high quality objective lenses by Drs Brunner and Dobschal from Carl Zeiss AG. It is particularly exciting to have this chapter in the book because it is likely that di?ractive elements will play an increasingly imp- tant role in high precision optical instrumentation in the future. The second new chapter is by Daniel Axelrod of University of Michigan on total internal re?ection ?uorescence (TIRF). We believe that many readers will ?nd the chapter from Prof. Axelrod, who developed TIRF about 20 years ago, insightful and very interesting. In addition to the new chapters some chapters have been revised and consid- ably expanded. These revisions are primarily there to include the most up-to-date material and recent advances of the ?eld. Special note of thanks must go to Drs Claus Ascheron and Angela Lahee of Springer-Verlagfor their encouragementand help.

This book highlights the rapidly developing field of advanced optical methods for structural and functional brain imaging. As is known, the brain is the most poorly understood organ of a living body. It is indeed the most complex structure in the known universe and, thus, mapping of the brain has become one of the most exciting frontlines of contemporary research. Starting from the fundamentals of the brain, neurons and synapses, this book presents a streamlined and focused coverage of the core principles, theoretical and experimental approaches, and state-of-the-art applications of most of the currently used imaging methods in brain research. It presents contributions from international leaders on different photonics-based brain imaging modalities and techniques. Included are comprehensive descriptions of many of the technology driven spectacular advances made over the past few years that have allowed novel insights of the structural and functional details of neurons.The bookis targeted at researchers, engineers and scientists who are working in the field of brain imaging, neuroscience and connectomics. Although this book is not intended to serve as a textbook, it will appeal to undergraduate students engaged in the specialization of brain imaging.

This book highlights the rapidly developing field of advanced optical methods for structural and functional brain imaging.