The general aim of this Optical Society of America (OSA) conference, entitled OSA Topical Meeting on Biomedical Optics (or BIOMED for short), is to bring together people working in biomedical optics to exchange ideas and advance the fields of clinical translation of optical technology, of optical technology innovation and dissemination and of regulatory aspects. BIOMED is a multidisciplinary conference aimed at clinicians, medical professionals and scientists who are actively developing optical biomedical technologies or utilizing optical technology to advance biomedical and drug discovery. In addition to this core of biomedical optical scientists, the organizers also hope to attract scientists with new or upcoming photonic technologies that may have practical application in biomedicine, including the field of nanotechnology, probe and agent chemistry, systems biology etc. In addition the conference chair actively solicits participation of the industry for translating or disseminating these technologies into the commercial sector.
An aim of the conference is therefore to provide researchers associated with biomedical optics with a forum of information on both the newest and greatest technologies and the corresponding needs and application areas relevant to biomedicine including clinical and industrial translation. Examples of the field include the propagation of knowledge on optical coherence tomography for clinical applications or the development of several fluorescence and microscopic imaging technologies for preclinical and clinical imaging. It is hoped that these interactions will stimulate the development and translation of new technologies for biomedicine. In particular, BIOMED aims at: 1. Attracting top pathologists, doctors and biologist and photonic scientists under one forum with the aim of allowing a two directional information flow from technology development to biomedical and clinical application and vice versa. Travel and registration will be paid up to $500 for any senior investigator invited to present a talk. 2. Attracting top-notch speakers for tutorials &educational sessions as well as industrial roll-outs. The attraction of excellent invited speakers requires travel and registration support. Therefore, travel and registration will be paid up to $500 for invited or tutorial speakers. The tutorial sessions are important for bring the general audience up to speed on some of the details involved in the technology behind the experiments presented. This helps students, non-physicists, and those unfamiliar with a particular field to understand the background behind the subsequent talks, and is a unique feature of the OSA BIOMED meeting. Industrial roll-outs in contrast will be sponsored by the industry. 3. Assuring that junior faculty, post-docs and excellent graduate students can attend. The goal of this specific aim is to assure that junior scientists with excellent credentials are able to attend regardless of the financial status of their research groups. Therefore, registration scholarships will be awarded to young/student scientists.
Imaging technologies have enabled numerous discoveries in biomedicine and provided early diagnosis of disease. Optics detects not only tissue structure but also tissue function and is expected to make even greater impact in biomedicine. In particular, the optical imaging and diagnostic technologies to be covered in this conference can potentially detect cancer at an early stage and hence improve survival of cancer patients.
