Fundamentals of Optical Imaging.

Optical imaging, which possesses noninvasive and high-resolution features for biomedical imaging, has been used to study various biological samples, from in vitro cells, ex vivo tissue, to in vivo imaging of living organism. Furthermore, optical imaging also covers a very wide scope of spatial scale, from submicron sized organelles to macro-scale live biological samples, enabling it a powerful tool for biomedical studies. Before introducing these superior optical imaging methods to researchers, first of all, it is necessary to present the basic concept of light-matter interactions such as absorption, scattering, and fluorescence, which can be used as the imaging contrast and also affect the imaging quality. And then the working mechanism of various imaging modalities including fluorescence microscopy, confocal microscopy, multiphoton microscopy, super-resolution microscopy, optical coherence tomography (OCT), diffuse optical tomography (DOT), etc. will be presented. Meanwhile, the main features and typical bioimaging applications of these optical imaging technologies are discussed. Finally, the perspective of future optical imaging methods is presented. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the background and principle of optical imaging for grasping the mechanism of advanced optical imaging modalities introduced in the following chapters.