Search
Menu
Lambda Research Optics, Inc. - Mission
LinkedIn

Douglas Farmer
Photonics Media

Douglas FarmerSenior Editor Douglas Farmer has been a journalist for nearly 20 years, winning awards for health and education reporting. He has a master's degree in journalism from Ball State University. He is editor of BioPhotonics and Vision Spectra magazines.

Articles
By Douglas Farmer

November 2025
Fiber Optics Clarifies the View of Neural Activity
Optical fiber was once relegated to simple light delivery and collection in medical instruments, often for exploratory procedures. Today, this fiber winds its way into all manner of instrumentation...
November 2025
Clues from the feline brain
Many scientists rely on mice as test subjects to examine the biological symptoms of dementia, particularly mice genetically altered to develop the condition in their brains. But cats can also develop...
September 2025
Closing the security loop
Cybersecurity is a buzzword in many business sectors, and the machine vision industry is no exception. Employers regularly train employees on how to keep their email and internal data storage free of...
September 2025
The gravity of cellular changes
Microfluidics and fluorescence microscopy have long been integral to diagnostics and the life sciences. Recently, a group of researchers advanced this union into space — at least in principle....
July 2025
Health insights, miniaturized
In recent years, the fusion of optofluidics with chip-based imaging methods has been the subject of research and development around the world. The ability to isolate analytes in a miniaturized...
June 2025
Specialized Vision Systems Monitor Hot Zones
High-radiation environments, such as nuclear facilities, provide unique challenges in vision systems. Courtesy of iStock.com/Bim. In an active nuclear power plant or a nuclear fuel recycling...
June 2025
Hyperspectral imaging goes hazelnuts
Hyperspectral imaging has long been recognized for its ability to evaluate the freshness and consistency of food products and highlight their impurities. And a recent study in Catalonia, Spain,...
May 2025
Stretching out Brillouin microscopy
Brillouin microscopy, long recognized for its ability to identify the biomechanical properties of a sample, has been hindered by slow image acquisition. This is the result of weak signal strength...
March 2025
Brain Cancer Imaging Innovations Capture Prestigious Prize
Two professors engaged in neuroscience research have received a major scientific award for their use of two-photon imaging and optogenetics to develop a new understanding of the way cancers...
March 2025
Second harmonic generation reveals system structure
Second-harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy has advantages in biomedical research, such as low phototoxicity along with high resolution and deep penetration of tissue. Michael Zachariadis, who...
March 2025
Inspection throughout production
During the tumultuous last few years in the machine vision market, companies that have thrived have benefited from reinforcing their places in the value chain of industry. Successful businesses have...
January 2025
Terahertz gets skin-deep
Due to high absorption in water, terahertz waves don’t travel deeply in tissue. So, in the clinic, terahertz imaging has often focused on surface water content and structural details —...
January 2025
Tapping the Terahertz: Capturing Clues in Tissue Hydration
Terahertz imaging has long been used in manufacturing applications, such as materials and pharmaceutical quality inspection, or in illicit drug and explosives detection. Due to its low photon...
December 2024
Advanced OCT System Integral to Eye Transplantation
An adaptation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) put into use at Northwestern University, visible OCT (vis-OCT), will be a key component in an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health...
November 2024
AI Accelerates Skin Lesion Identification
Historically, the gold standard for diagnostics in dermatology has been histopathology, which is the examination of tissues and cells under a microscope. The tissue sample that is extracted from the...
November 2024
A sharper view of skin conditions
For the trained clinician, an experienced eye can provide guidance to address developing skin conditions. But for doctors like Elaine Gilmore, a practicing dermatologist for 15 years who has seen...
October 2024
Photoacoustics Captures Anomalies in Microvasculature
By using a laser to generate ultrasound waves that reveal structural changes, photoacoustic tomography (PAT) has shown its value in identifying disease conditions in the microvasculature, the tiny...
October 2024
Spectroscopic Headset Could Reveal Stroke Risk
Despite the danger stroke presents to large segments of the population, clinicians have historically been at a disadvantage in successfully identifying those at grave risk of having a stroke ahead of...
September 2024
Getting the signal (from Raman)
To capitalize on the specificity of Raman spectra in biomedicine and the life sciences, some researchers have turned to surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to clearly ascertain the vibrational...
September 2024
Quantum Effect Generates Different View of Alzheimer’s
An exploration into quantum effects produced in nanoscale biological processes has the potential to upend traditional perceptions of the causes and effects of Alzheimer’s disease and other...
July 2024
Fiber running through STED
Thanks to stimulation emission depletion (STED) microscopy, scientists can capture subcellular dynamics, such as the plasticity of dendritic spines that are responsible for transferring electrical...
July 2024
STED Microscopy Uncovers Signals Between Molecules
Stimulation emission depletion (STED) microscopy is a mainstay in superresolution imaging, since scientists established its capability to drastically improve the lateral resolution present in...
May 2024
A wider net for clinical research
Research in optics and photonics as well as advancements in the design of versatile bedside systems have achieved breakthroughs in everything from our understanding of cellular metabolism to the...
March 2024
Single Fiber Endoscopy Records Neural and Vascular Detail
The growing incidence of chronic diseases around the world has driven the expansion of techniques to provide diagnosis at the source, which would ideally involve a minimally invasive — but...
March 2024
Fiber plots a focused diagnostic path
When ancestors of modern endoscopy first peered into cavities of the human body, they used candlelight or burned a mixture of alcohol and turpentine, which illuminated a thin tube equipped with a...
January 2024
With a new year, a new look to our magazine
Welcome to the new look of BioPhotonics! We’re thrilled to have you as readers and hope our improved appearance enhances your visual experience, and your enjoyment, while learning about the...
November 2023
Cellular analysis goes live
For biomedical researchers working with cell culture, an accurate, real-time reading of progression and confluency (density) in cell populations is their ultimate objective. The information gleaned...
November 2023
Color shopping — how cuttlefish camouflage
Scientists have long believed that when cuttlefish camouflage in response to danger, they physiologically choose a color pattern from a limited number of pigmentation schemes to best match their...
November 2023
Live-Cell Imaging Follows Early Signs of Mutation and Disease
Scientists are increasingly turning to live-cell imaging to track changes at the developmental stage of life, which is vital for the advancement of cellular biology, and to grow and monitor...
September 2023
Real smarts boosts AI value
Scientists in the biophotonics community have long recognized the value of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in diagnostics, ever since the creation of a computer-assisted detection...
July 2023
Gaining an edge in cancer diagnostics
Fluorescence polarization imaging, which measures the polarization of specific fluorophores relative to excitation light, has recently become a tool with which clinicians have sought to clearly...
July 2023
UV signals from orchids entice bees to visit
In the animal kingdom, certain species are adept at camouflaging themselves to blend in with their surroundings to avoid the attention of predators. But in the plant kingdom, certain species of...
May 2023
Clearing arterial plaques
Nearly 18 million people died of cardiovascular disease worldwide in 2019, according to the World Health Organization. The biggest contributing factors are largely preventable — high blood...
May 2023
Pulsed Lasers Make Headway in Treating Cardiovascular Disease
Patients with heart disease often face a daunting journey from diagnosis to treatment. They may learn, after experiencing chest pains or shortness of breath, that they have arteriosclerosis, or...
March 2023
An unprecedented view of the origins of disease
Photoacoustic microscopy is allowing researchers and clinicians an unprecedented view — based on the technique’s ability to reveal information about the circulation of cells throughout...
January 2023
The mission continues
With the launch of BioPhotonics in the fall of 1994, its publishers set out to create what no other magazine had done before: a forum for in-depth reporting on photonics solutions for the medical and...
January 2023
Putting ‘skin in the game’ to restore vision
A team of scientists at Linköping University and LinkoCare Life Sciences in Sweden may have found an answer to the problem of restoring people’s eyesight — and it’s only skin...
November 2022
NIH Grant Supports Portable OCT Detection of Jaundice in Newborns
A smartphone-based system that relies on OCT to detect jaundice in newborns will be put to use diagnosing very young patients in the U.S. and Nigeria, thanks to a nearly $500,000 grant from the...
October 2022
Innovations in the STORM Method Reveal Vital Clues to Disease Formation
Scientists and clinicians have long believed that visualizing structural changes in the nucleus of cancer cells would unlock vital clues about how the disease first forms. This information could...
September 2022
Multiphoton techniques go deeper into detail
As scientists seek to image deeper in tissue with high enough resolution to track cellular processes, they are increasingly turning to multiphoton techniques. In multiphoton microscopy,...
July 2022
LEDs light a path to diagnosis
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, causing nearly 18 million deaths in 2019 alone, according to the World Health Organization. The vast majority of these deaths occurred...
June 2022
Expanding the Range: Wearables Enable the Next Level of Mobile Health Data Monitoring
The next generation of wearable devices will no longer be created only for the fitness-conscious to monitor their daily steps or heart rate on a smartwatch. Increasingly sophisticated photonic...
May 2022
AI brings swift diagnosis
Medical imaging modalities are now faster and more powerful than ever before, capturing thousands of images of diseased and healthy tissue. These images represent a vast resource for researchers and...
March 2022
Exciting fluorophores
In the early iterations of microfluidic technology, researchers and health care providers relied on the techniques to identify a handful of biomarkers by manipulating bodily fluids through...
January 2022
Building a better PCR test
The spread of infections caused by variants of the coronavirus issues a stark reminder to the medical and scientific communities, and to the rest of us who rely on these communities, that the...
January 2022
The Pandemic Is Driving Innovative Microfluidic Disease Detection
As medicine and the monitoring of health have advanced into the modern era, researchers and clinicians have sought to capture an ever-increasing number of the biomarkers that are carried in...
December 2021
Spectroscopists watch fruit dry
Health-conscious consumers are placing increasing demands on food producers for both variety and freshness, while producers, in turn, seek convenient, sustainable solutions that will allow them to...
November 2021
Researchers go eye to eye with octopuses
The loss of macular pigment is a precursor to macular degeneration, a disorder that afflicts millions every year. Historically, there has been no easy way to test for loss of pigment as part of a...
November 2021
Shrinking Components Mark Embedded Cameras
Embedded cameras, often called board-level cameras, may measure only a few centimeters in width, but they represent a key element in the evolution of machine vision capabilities. With improvements in...
October 2021
Laser Therapy Reaches Hard-to-Treat Epilepsy
For decades, the most commonly used treatments for epilepsy were pharmaceuticals or resection surgery, which involves removing a segment of brain tissue from where the patient’s seizures...
September 2021
Raman technique spots early-stage viruses
In the laboratory, scientists and clinicians have come to rely on Raman spectroscopy because of its ability to provide chemically specific information about biospecimens. A variation on conventional...
July 2021
Proteins make the invisible visible
Changes in the proteins inside a cell may indicate the presence of a particular disease or condition, and these changes have been historically difficult to track. For many years, it was believed that...
June 2021
Lasers deter birds from salmon run
Juvenile salmon traveling in the Columbia River near McNary Dam in Oregon are vulnerable to hungry birds that lurk overhead. Thanks to the Walla Walla District of the Army Corps of Engineers, which...
May 2021
Detecting early-stage Lyme
Lyme disease continues to infect a large swath of the population in North America. The reliance on the standard two-tiered serodiagnostic test to identify its presence has proved problematic because...
May 2021
Scientists follow fruit fly guidance system
A possible key to developing reliable navigation in autonomous vehicles may have been found through a window into the fruit fly’s brain. With the aid of live calcium imaging and two- photon...
April 2021
Laser Technology Enhances and Expands the Medical Toolkit
Medical lasers have been used for decades in surgical contexts. In recent years, the development of compact, easy-to-use, and often self-contained modules has opened doors for new or enhanced...
April 2021
Plasmonics and Microfluidics Speed Detection of Lyme Disease
When a person develops Lyme disease from a tick bite, identifying the tiny culprit can be challenging. The insect itself is difficult to see in the grass or forested area it comes from before...
March 2021
Z-splitter prism achieves resolution deep in sample
Historically, when scientists and clinicians looked through a traditional microscope, they saw only a thin 2D plane of a sample. This was unhelpful for understanding complex cellular processes or the...
February 2021
UV light helps to set marine life clock
Human swimmers may need a waterproof watch to tell time while bathing in the ocean, but certain marine species whose internal clocks are regulated by light do not. With this circadian regulation...
January 2021
Finding answers in the blood
Blood tests are vital in the diagnosis of many conditions, especially where anemia and other blood disorders are common — for example, in developing countries and areas such as sub-Saharan...
December 2020
Imaging cap helps researchers to see inside a baby’s mind
Parents and caretakers of little ones know that babies move around constantly — often getting into trouble in the process. But researchers in and around London know that, as an indicator of...
December 2020
High-Speed Imaging Capabilities and Applications Expand
Fast and efficient delivery of product into the customer’s hands is the endgame in manufacturing. Any defect that occurs as products progress along the manufacturing line may be magnified,...
November 2020
OCT branches out
Anyone who has recently had an eye examination may have been ushered into a room that contained an optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanner. This technology uses backscattered light to construct...
November 2020
How old is that fish in the window?
Shoppers for fresh seafood often find themselves questioning the age of the fish they buy at the seafood counter. They may make an educated guess by smell at the store, or taste, after bringing it...
October 2020
Veterinarians Use OCT to Evaluate Eye Health, Cancer Margins, and Joint Strength
Medical doctors have long understood the value of optical coherence tomography (OCT) for monitoring human health. Veterinarians are learning that the technology can be just as vital in evaluating the...
September 2020
A deep dive into tissue
Our cover story in this edition relates how Raman imaging allows for the examination of cells and tissue, which can help to analyze a whole range of pathologies and conditions. Bioimaging is most...
August 2020
Photocatalyst Combination Enables Efficient Water Splitting
The breakdown of water has long been conceived as a clean way to produce hydrogen fuel, but the process has proven to be inefficient for widespread energy production in this manner. But the work of a...
August 2020
3D Printing Provides Building Blocks of Healing in Scaffold Design
A group of researchers has demonstrated that assembling a network of tiny, approximately 1.5-mm3 blocks with the aid of optical technology can be an effective way to accelerate healing in tissue and...
July 2020
Marine Luminescence Appears After Stress Test
No matter how small, organisms respond to their surrounding environment. A group of scientists at the University of Cambridge has shown that the light produced by ocean organisms is related to the...
July 2020
Researchers Use Light and 3D Printing to Pump Life into Heart
Although it can be difficult to get heart muscle cells to propagate in large numbers, a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota has found a way to use 3D printing and light-induced...
July 2020
Superresolution Microscopy Images Common Alzheimer’s Protein
As superresolution microscopy has advanced, so too has scientists’ ability to dive deep into the neural network and the compounds that accumulate in conjunction with a variety of conditions....
July 2020
Methodology Aids Microscopic Study of Fibrils in Molecules
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have found a mechanism to efficiently and accurately measure the point spread functions (PSFs) of the position of molecules, called variance upper...
July 2020
Photonics community moves at 'warp speed'
Reported new infections of COVID-19 have continued to ebb and flow around the world. But the need for an adaptable battery of diagnostic tests built around cutting-edge imaging that can be...
July 2020
‘Whispering-Gallery’ Effect Enhances Optical Pulses
Researchers in Germany have proven that when electrons are grouped with an optical whispering-gallery mode (WGM) inside a tiny sphere, the resulting pulses gain strength, similar to how audio waves...
June 2020
Optical Technology Covers Soldiers on Battlefield
Military personnel have sophisticated technology at their fingertips in combat, and thanks to a federally funded research program, they may soon also have optical technologies ranging from wearable...
June 2020
Microlasers Capture Heart’s Rhythm from Inside
Dynamic, rapid changes in the heart that can be seen from the outside are dramatic, but they’re nothing compared to what can be seen inside heart cells themselves. And a research team from the...
June 2020
Dye Boosts Bioimaging Capability
Fluorescence imaging has been a boon to research and medicine because of its ability to examine affected areas noninvasively. But the dyes used for these purposes have their disadvantages, and as...
June 2020
Portable Virus Disinfection Within Reach
With the rapid spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 and others, researchers, clinicians, custodial staff, and the general population are looking for the most efficient way to disinfect surfaces...
June 2020
Lidar Technology Reveals Historic Mayan Site
A team of researchers led by archaeologists from the University of Arizona has used a laser mapping system from the air to uncover the buried ruins of an ancient Mayan site. After determining that an...
June 2020
Couples’ minds think alike when together
Readers may have heard about parents who are “in sync” with each other when raising their children. Now, a new study at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore has used...
May 2020
SCAPE Microscopy Captures Image of Odor Detection
The olfactory system that lets mammals detect and identify odors starts with a wide array of G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), which are located on olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) that comprise...
May 2020
An image of COVID-19
Millions of people worldwide are caught up in the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 and the new reality that has restricted movements, interactions, and ways of doing business. This burden has...
April 2020
Diffuse Optics Filters Diagnoses
Diffuse optics and the study of light absorption and scattering in various tissues can track blood oxygenation and other factors that help assemble an accurate medical diagnosis. Light scatters...
March 2020
A million volunteers in view
Bioengineering now makes up about 13% of the overall budget of the National Institutes of Health, and this number is only projected to grow. During a keynote address at BiOS 2020 in February in San...
February 2020
Opsins Travel to the Brain’s Hidden Places
The brain is one of the most complex systems in the known universe, a living computer that controls not only basic functions of the body but ponders and directs responses to what’s going on in...
September 2019
Optics Peers Through the Haze of Dementia
As the number of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias grows, so too does the pressure on the medical community to identify dementias as early as possible and...

Explore Our Content
News
Feature Articles
Latest Products
Webinars
White Papers
All Things Photonics Podcast
Photonics Spectra Now
Videos
Our Summits & Conferences
Industry Events
Bookstore
Join Our Community
Subscribe
Advertise
Become a member
Sign in
Contribute a Feature
Suggest a Webinar
Submit a Press Release
Mobile Apps

About Us
Our Company
Our Publications
Editorial Advisory Board
Contact Us
Career Opportunities
Teddi C. Laurin Scholarship

Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)



©2025 Photonics Media
100 West St.
Pittsfield, MA, 01201 USA
info@photonics.com
We use cookies to improve user experience and analyze our website traffic as stated in our Privacy Policy. By using this website, you agree to the use of cookies unless you have disabled them.