Tributes to past researchers and their contributions to optics and photonics will converge with talks surrounding ongoing innovation in quantitative phase imaging (QPI) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) in diagnostics and disease prevention at the SPIE BiOS Expo, which will kick off Photonics West 2025. Conference presentations, panel discussions, poster sessions, and device demonstrations will engender lively discussions on optics in point-of-care instruments as well as in long-term health monitoring. The event takes place Jan. 25 to 26 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Researchers interact with their colleagues at the annual poster session during SPIE BiOS. Courtesy of SPIE. The annual exhibition will feature numerous companies in the biomedical and life sciences space, offering the latest technology in hand-held microscopic and spectroscopic systems, fiber optic imaging, and demonstrations of a variety of multiline laser modules. Sergio Fantini of Tufts University, who once again will chair the BiOS symposium along with Paola Taroni of Politecnico di Milano, said there will be tributes to the late Joseph Izatt of Duke University during the OCT session, as well as an award given in honor of Gabriel Popescu of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who helped pioneer the QPI track. Fantini said that the use of artificial intelligence in biomedical research is a burgeoning area at the conference, with hundreds of papers submitted. Photonics companies share some of their recently released equipment with interested attendees during the BiOS Expo. Courtesy of SPIE. Ji-Xin Cheng, the Theodore Moustakas Chair Professor in Photonics and Optoelectronics at Boston University, speaks during the 2024 BiOS Hot Topics program on Stimulated Raman Photothermal Microscopy. Courtesy of SPIE. Those interested in next-generation research will be well served by attending the Hot Topics program on Saturday evening, a rapid-fire presentation of varied topics, such as Image-Guided Interventions (Daniel Elson of Imperial College London); Investigating Tissue Mechanopathology with Speckle Techniques (Seemantini Nadkarni of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Harvard Medical School); and From Saliva to Surgery: Raman Spectroscopy with Open-Sourced Software Provides Diagnostics for Viruses and Cancer (Frederic Leblond of Polytechnique Montréal). Hot Topics will conclude with the presentation of the annual Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award. Application tracks Academic sessions at the BiOS conference will be divided into several application tracks: Medical Photonics: Therapeutics and Diagnostics. Presenters will cover diagnostic interventions in the middle and inner ear; the use of multimodal spectroscopy to assess skin properties; and the OCT-driven examination of human nails of subjects with different skin types. The co-chairs are Brian Jet-Fei Wong of the Beckman Laser Institute at the University of California Irvine, and Gabriela Apiou of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Harvard Medical School. Neurophotonics, Neurosurgery, and Optogenetics. Sessions feature the use of NIR spectroscopy to study stress induced by social interactions; the examination of optical response to anesthetic drugs using laser speckle imaging; and the estimation of intracranial pressure with diffuse correlation spectroscopy. Shy Shoham of New York University and Anna Devor of Boston University co-chair this session. Technologies for Translational Biophotonics. Speakers will explore areas such as the use of a hand-held polarization-sensitive spectral scanner to diagnose burn wounds; the identification of pulmonary fibrosis using swept-source OCT along with second harmonic generation imaging; and the introduction of shearing interferometric fluorescence tomography for depth and spectrally resolved information in tissue. Tuan Vo-Dinh of Duke University and Anita Mahadevan-Jansen of Vanderbilt University will serve as co-chairs. Tissue Optics and Light-Tissue Interaction. Scientists will reveal results from varied experiments, such as a computational approach to determine laser safety in liver tissue; calibration-free laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy for the analysis of biological samples; and the evaluation of pulsed infrared light on dendritic spines of neurons. E. Duco Jansen of Vanderbilt University and Jessica C. Ramella-Roman of Florida International University are co-chairs. Biomedical Spectroscopy, Microscopy, and Imaging. Attendees in this track can garner insights into applications such as on-chip flow cytometry using integrated photonics; the use of intravital three-photon microscopy to study bone marrow skull channels; and enhanced image denoising in fluorescence microscopy using a self-developed principal component analysis-based algorithm. The co-chairs are Ammasi Periasamy of the University of Virginia and Daniel L. Farkas of the University of Southern California. Nano-Biophotonics. Presentations in this vast arena of discovery will include the detection of cancer protein biomarkers in serum with surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy; the superresolved multiplexed imaging of RNA molecules inside biopsies; and nanoscale remote optical sleep apnea diagnostics using speckle-based analysis. Paras Prasad of the University of Buffalo and Ewa M. Goldys of the University of New South Wales will co-chair this track. Best Paper Awards. The BiOS Best Paper Awards will recognize innovative approaches to real-time diagnostics in spectroscopy, wearable technologies, and QPI, and will be sponsored by companies including Photothermal Spectroscopy Corp., Thorlabs Inc., Hamamatsu Corp., Spectra-Physics, Seno Medical Instruments Inc., TomoWave Laboratories Inc., JenLab GmbH, PicoQuant GmbH, Prizmatix, and Ocean Optics. Award categories include Optical Biopsy: Toward Real-Time Spectroscopic Imaging and Diagnosis; Microfluidics, BioMEMS, and Medical Microsystems; Biophotonics in Exercise Science, Sports Medicine, Health Monitoring Technologies, and Wearables; Optical Interactions with Tissue and Cells; Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing; Polarized Light and Optical Angular Momentum for Biomedical Diagnostics; Quantitative Phase Imaging; Multiphoton Microscopy in the Biomedical Sciences; Single-Molecule Spectroscopy and Superresolution Imaging; Nanoscale Imaging, Sensing, and Actuation for Biomedical Applications; and Colloidal Nanoparticles for Biomedical Applications. BiOS Expo The annual exhibition at BiOS continues to attract companies that are putting their imaging systems — and relevant components and support software — at the center of biomedicine and life sciences research. Companies will both demonstrate and offer insights into laser modules, lenses, filters, fiber optics, and data analysis software to push the limits of medical diagnostics and therapeutics, as well as boost cancer tumor identification and follow the development of cell lines. Companies in this year’s show include Armadillo SIA, Boston Electronics, Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH, Chroma, Coherent, DRS Daylight Solutions, Edmund Optics, Etaluma Inc., Excelitas Technologies Corp., Hamamatsu Corp., HÜBNER Photonics, Ibsen Photonics, Iridian Spectral Technologies, Light Conversion, Mad City Labs Inc., MKS Instruments Inc., NKT Photonics Inc., Oxxius SA, Physik Instrumente, PicoQuant Photonics North America Inc., Prior Scientific Inc., Teledyne Imaging, TOPTICA Photonics Inc., Wasatch Photonics Inc., and Zaber Technologies Inc. The BioPhotonics magazine will also have a booth during the expo. For more information about the show, visit www.spie.org.