Dr. Yan Liu
Welcome! I am a research associate in Prof. Donald T. Miller's group at Indiana University, School of Optometry. I did my postdoc training with Prof. Changhuei Yang in the Department of Electrical Engineering at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Under the mentorship of Prof. Lihong V. Wang (now professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at Caltech), I received my Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor's degree at Tsinghua University.
Research interest
​​​I am interested in developing tools for biologists and doctors. One specific interest is to developing techniques to break the optical diffusion limit of the operating depth of optical techniques, for achieving light focusing and optical imaging deep inside opaque media such as biological tissue. To this end, we have developed/improved optical phase conjugation based wavefront shaping techniques, including time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing and time-reversed adapted perturbation (TRAP) optical focusing. These techniques are used to focus light deep inside biological tissue, for noninvasive high-resolution optical imaging, manipulation (optogenetics, optical tweezers), and therapy. I have also done research in photoacoustic imaging, ultrasound-modulated optical tomography/acousto-optic imaging, fluorescence imaging, and adaptive optics OCT.
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In general, I am very interested in understanding how things work and building tools to study how things work. Please visit the "Publications", "Posters", and "Video presentations" pages to know more about our work.
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Keywords: Focusing light through scattering media, Wavefront shaping, Super-depth optical imaging, Adaptive optics, Optical phase conjugation, Time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing, Time-reversed adapted perturbation (TRAP) optical focusing, Acousto-optic imaging (Ultrasound-modulated optical tomography), Photoacoustic imaging, Adaptive-optics optical coherence tomography, Ophthalmic imaging.
News
2024 In the ARVO 2024 conference, Yan presented our work on using adaptive optics OCT to image the photoreceptor somas and other cellular structures in the outer nuclei layer of living human retina, which won the POTY (Picture of the Year) prize given by Prof. Austin Roorda at University of California, Berkeley.
2023 In the SPIE Photonics West 2023 conference, Yan presented our work on ultrafast adaptive optics for imaging the living human retina, which won the highly competitive Pascal Rol Award for best paper in ophthalmic technologies.
