Development and Validation of Biophotonic Sensors towards Research, Industrial and Clinical Applications

Dear Colleagues,

There has been a growing interest in biophotonic sensors in applications including biomedicine, the environment, forensics, livestock, agriculture, quality control and validation in food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries, military, security, and a wide range of other applications. Emerging biophotonic sensors have been developed to enable the non-invasive observation of biological systems with high sensitivity, accuracy, and spatial and temporal resolutions. These biological systems include organisms, tissues, biofluids, cells and subcellular structures.

In particular, optical and photonic technologies enable simultaneous sensing at structural and molecular levels, which is attractive for numerous devices, including (1) compact devices for cameras/imaging sensors, smartphones, wearable sensors, (2) high-precision sensors for quality control, (3) high-sensitive/high-contrast sensors to unveil biological processes happening at small analyte concentrations, (4) high-resolution sensors to observe structures at nano- and micro-scales, (5) long-distance sensors to monitor organisms without perturbing the ecosystem or for real-time online analysis of biological systems in industrial products or bioreactors.

This Special Issue focuses on the development and validation of novel biophotonic sensors for their targeted applications, and advances in optical techniques for next-generation devices. Contributions are invited for this Special Issue from researchers working on hardware and software development of biophotonic sensors.

Biophotonic sensors include imaging devices, point-spectroscopy instruments and fiber optic devices, as well as sensors based on micro- and nano-photonics, waveguide devices and novel materials. Optical techniques include 2D or 3D imaging and spectroscopy at reflectance, transmittance, confocal, and near-field geometries, as well as probing from the ultraviolet region through the visible (UV-Vis) and infrared region (IR) to the terahertz (THz) region. These techniques include, but are not limited to, photoacoustic and acousto-optic tomography or topography, OCT, CARS, SRS, SERS, TERS, SHG, and can explore photophysical processes, such as light absorption, scattering, fluorescence, multi-photon absorption, second-harmonic generation, Raman, and upconversion.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Validation of existing sources, light-shaping devices, detectors and data processing approaches for novel applications.
• Optimization of novel or existing software for real-time, high accuracy and/or high-throughput sample analysis.
• Investigation of new biomarkers, imaging and spectroscopy features and applications.
• Development and performance of new detectors.
• Development and performance of new sources and light-shaping devices.
• Development and performance of novel 2D or 3D imaging sensing systems.
• Development and performance of lab-on-a-chip devices.
• Development and performance of novel computational imaging approaches, including compressive sensing and machine/deep learning techniques.

Dr. Marcelo Saito Nogueira
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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