9627352 Hennage This proposal seeks support from NSF by the Optical Society of America for the "1996 Advances in Optical Imaging and Photon Migration Topical Meeting," to be held March 18-20, 1996, in Orlando, Florida. The meeting focuses on progress in optical imaging which depends crucially on progress in a number of disciplines. Moreover, various techniques need to be judged in the light of competing methods and sharpened with the knowledge of progress of allied methods. For example, imaging with light and with near infrared radiation may soon lead to important new modalities for medical imaging and diagnosis of the brain or breast diseases. Several time resolved, frequency modulation, coherence, speckle and inverse techniques are now being developed to characterize the key properties of tissues that are associated with variations in the absorption and scattering cross sections. Use is made of coherent backscattering, ballistic and early arriving light, ultrafast pulse techniques and spatial filtering, spectral dynamics, time-resolved holography, interference and coherence of nonlinear optical phenomena, and phase modulation approaches. The funds requested from the NSF are to support travel to the conference of outstanding graduate students, post doctoral fellows and junior faculty. This is the second conference in this series. The first conference served as the touchstone for the progress of the field. It represented a clear statement of the state of the art of the time and played an important role in defining the challenges ahead. ***
