Fabrication of Deformable Micro Mirrors

Histology studies the microscopic anatomy of biological tissues, which is critical to clinical disease management and fundamental to biological understanding. However, current approaches that rely on bright-field microscopy require extensive issue preparation prior to imaging and may thus take days. Photoacoustic remote sensing, or PARS, can dramatically reduce the histology bio-imaging time from days to minutes. PARS microscopy must be capable of 3D imaging or optical sectioning, which enables visualizing multiple layers of disease tissue without the need for lengthy physical sectioning. This in turn calls for auto-focusing or adaptive optics, to focus on different depths of the tissue (i.e. optical sectioning). In this project, we will fabricate resonant deformable micro-mirrors that can shift the focus by ~10cm as needed for high throughput PARS microscopy, with mirror actuation voltage down to 20V. Besides auto-focusing, the mirror can also correct aberrations of the optical system. Moreover, the resonant micro-mirror can avoid the high electrode count (on the order of hundreds), complex drive electronics and control software, as needed by the conventional DC/static actuation of deformable micro-mirrors.

Faculty Supervisor:

Bo Cui

Student:

Partner:

illumiSonics Inc

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

University of Waterloo

Program: