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Transabdominal fetal pulse oximetry offers a promising approach to improve fetal monitoring and reduce unnecessary interventions. Utilizing realistic 3D geometries derived from MRI scans of pregnant women, we conducted photon simulations to determine optimal source-detector configurations for detecting fetal heart rate and oxygenation. Our findings demonstrate the theoretical feasibility of measuring fetal signals at depths up to 30 mm using source-detector (SD) distances greater than 100 mm and wavelengths between 730 and 850 nm. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of customizing SD configurations based on fetal position and maternal anatomy. These insights pave the way for enhanced non-invasive fetal monitoring in clinical application., Competing Interests: JMK and MPD have conflict of interest with Raydiant Oximetry, Inc., (© 2024 The Author(s).)

There is an urgent need for improved respiratory surveillance of preterm infants. Gas in scattering media absorption spectroscopy (GASMAS) is emerging as a potential clinical cutaneous monitoring tool of lung functions in neonates. A challenge in the clinical translation of GASMAS is to obtain sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratios in the measurements, since the light attenuation is high in human tissue. Previous GASMAS studies on piglets have shown higher signal quality with an internal source, as more light propagates through the lung and the loss due to scattering and absorption is less. In this article we simulated light propagation with an intratracheal and a dermal source, and investigated the signal quality and lung volume probed. The results suggest that GASMAS has the potential to measure respiratory volumes; and the sensitivity is higher for an intratracheal source which also enables to probe most of the lung., (© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Biophotonics published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

The current technology for monitoring fetal wellbeing during child birth is cardiotocography. However, CTG has high false positive rates that lead to unnecessary emergency Cesarean deliveries and false negatives that result in birth injuries. To curtail these issues, fetal pulse oximetery has been a topic of interest for many decades. Fetal pulse oximetry would yield the oxygen saturation of the fetus in utero and provide a more robust marker for clinicians to make decisions about performing emergency Cesarean deliveries. Here, we present a review of biomedical optical developments related to transabdominal fetal pulse oximetery in the biophotonics field and the challenges that must be overcome to make transabdominal pulse oximetry a clinical reality., (© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Biophotonics published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

About a third of babies are delivered by Cesarean section. There has been an increase in maternal deaths during labor due to complications with subsequent births after a C-section. Therefore, there is a clinical motivation to reduce the C-section rate. Current techniques are, however, inefficient at determining fetal distress leading to a high false positive rate for complications and ultimately a C-section. For the current study, Monte Carlo simulations were used to calculate the amount of signal received on a model of a pregnant mother, as well as, the percent of the signal that comes from the fetal layer. Models with and without a 1 mm amniotic fluid were compared and showed differing trends., (© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Biophotonics published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

In vivo imaging of self-illuminating bio-and chemiluminescent reporters is used to observe the physiology of small animals. However, strong light scattering by biological tissues results in poor spatial resolution of the optical imaging, which also degrades the quantitative accuracy. To overcome this challenging problem, focused ultrasound is used to modulate the light from the reporter at the ultrasound frequency. This produces an ultrasound switchable light 'beacon' that reduces the influence of light scattering in order to improve spatial resolution. The experimental results demonstrate that apart from light modulation at the ultrasound frequency (AC signal at 3.5 MHz), ultrasound also increases the DC intensity of the reporters. This is shown to be due to a temperature rise caused by insonification that was minimized to be within acceptable mammalian tissue safety thresholds by adjusting the duty cycle of the ultrasound. Line scans of bio-and chemiluminescent objects embedded within a scattering medium were obtained using ultrasound modulated (AC) and ultrasound enhanced (DC) signals. Lateral resolution is improved by a factor of 12 and 7 respectively, as compared to conventional CCD imaging. Two chemiluminescent sources separated by ~10 mm at ~20 mm deep inside a 50 mm thick chicken breast have been successfully resolved with an average signal-to-noise ratio of approximately 8-10 dB., Competing Interests: The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest related to this article.

Bioluminescence imaging has shown great potential for studying and monitoring disease progression in small animal pre-clinical imaging. However, absolute bioluminescence source recovery through tomographic multi-wavelength measurements is often hindered through the lack of quantitative accuracy and suffers from both poor localisation and quantitative recovery. In this work a method to incorporate a permissible region strategy through not only a priori location (permissible region) but also based on a model of light propagation and hence light sensitivity is developed and tested using both simulations and experimental data. Reconstructions on two different numerical models (a simple slab, and the digital version of a heterogeneous mouse) show an improvement of localisation and recovery of intensity (around 25% for the slab model and around 10% for the digital mouse model). This strategy is also used with experimental data from a phantom gel, which demonstrated an improved recovered tomographic image., Competing Interests: The authors do not have any conflict of interest to declare.

Probing local displacements on a scattering surface can be achieved using an adaptive interferometer. The photorefractive-crystal-based interferometer is popular, but alternatives exist such as an adaptive gain interferometer. Such setups take advantage of the nonlinear phenomena in laser media. Because of the gain saturation, it is possible to write a gain hologram and a refractive index hologram to achieve an adaptive interferometer with a linear response. In addition, laser-media-based setups have a fast response time (≤100  μs), which makes them interesting for applications such as detection of photoacoustic waves in living biological samples.