UP-born Columbia professor ‘reinvents microscope for brain and cancer research’ | Meerut News
MEERUT: A team led by Columbia University biological sciences professor Raju Tomer, 44, has come up with a new design for microscopes and microscope lenses that could push 3D tissue imaging beyond modern systems while dramatically reducing costs and complexity.His team’s breakthrough, published in the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology, solves a long-standing problem in medical imaging – how to capture clear, detailed, 3D images of tissues such as brain matter or cancerous tumors without the need for complex, expensive equipment.Elaborating, Tomer told TOI over phone from New York: “Think of it like photography. Some camera lenses take very sharp images but they are bulky, expensive and only work up close. Others are cheap and can shoot from a distance but produce blurry images. Scientists faced the same dilemma with microscopes used to image tissue. Expensive “oil immersion” lenses gave clear images but could not look deeply into tissue. Inexpensive lenses can go deeper but produce blurry results when used with special chemicals needed to make tissue transparent for 3D viewing. “Researchers were stuck with a choice between quality and affordability.”Tomer continued: “My team and I have invented a system called ‘HySIL’ (Hybrid Solid-Liquid Optics), which is a combination of a curved solid lens coupled with a specially matched liquid. Together they work as one seamless optical system, like two perfectly fitting puzzle pieces. This allows cheap and simple lenses to produce images as sharp as the most expensive laboratory equipment, at any depth, and with almost any tissue preparation method.”“Incidentally, Columbia University stated in its June 9 publication: “Tomer’s team’s solution, called ‘HySIL,’ addresses both problems. It combines a simple curved rigid lens with a precisely matched immersion fluid, so that the two act as one continuous optical system. The design allows inexpensive pneumatic lenses to deliver high-resolution images across centimeter-scale tissue, and across almost any common sample preparation method, without any hardware changes.”“Using this concept, the team led by Tomer built an additional compact device that plugs into microscopes already in laboratories around the world, and a high-resolution version called the “Super-Scope.” They also incorporated the technology into a small, commercially available microscope called ‘Slice’, which was developed by Tomer’s group in 2024 and was covered by TOI in its September 9, 2024 issue. The team used the technology to image whole mouse, salamander, and cavefish brains, miniature human brain tissue grown in the lab, and real human cancer biopsies in full 3D.According to a statement from Columbia University, traditionally, doctors and researchers examine thin, flat slices of tissue on glass slides, like looking at one floor of a building rather than the entire structure. This new technology allows them to see architecture at once, revealing biological details that flat images miss.“Examining 3D images of tissue allows you to see the entire structure of the tissue… Tools like pLSM-Scope that make this type of imaging affordable will become increasingly important as artificial intelligence helps us analyze larger amounts of tissue data for diagnosis and prognosis,” said Hanina Habshush, a professor of pathology and cell biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, who co-authored the paper.
