Meerut: A team led by Meerut-born professor of biological sciences at Columbia University, Raju Tomer, 44, has created a new design for microscopes and microscope lenses that could push 3D tissue imaging beyond state-of-the-art systems while drastically cutting costs and complexity.
Breakthrough in Medical Imaging
His team's breakthrough, published in the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology, solves a long-standing problem in medical imaging -- how to take sharp, detailed, three-dimensional photographs of tissues such as brain matter or cancer tumours without needing expensive, complicated equipment.
Elaborating, Tomer told TOI over phone from New York: "Think of it like photography. Some camera lenses take razor-sharp pictures but are bulky, costly and only work up close. Others are cheap and can shoot from a distance but produce blurry images. Scientists faced the same dilemma with microscopes used to image tissues. The expensive 'oil-immersion' lenses gave clear images but couldn't look deep into tissue. Cheaper lenses could go deeper but produced blurry results when used with the special chemicals needed to make tissues see-through for 3D viewing. Researchers were stuck choosing between quality and affordability."
Tomer continued, "I along with my team invented a system called 'HySIL' (Hybrid Solid-Liquid Optics), a combination of a curved solid lens paired with a specially matched liquid. Together, they act as one seamless optical system, like two puzzle pieces fitting perfectly. This lets cheap, simple lenses produce images as sharp as the most expensive lab equipment, at any depth, with almost any tissue preparation method."
Columbia University's Statement
Incidentally, Columbia University in its June 9 publication stated: "The Tomer team's solution, called 'HySIL', addresses both problems. It pairs a simple, curved solid lens with a precisely matched immersion liquid so the two function as a single continuous optical system. The design lets inexpensive air lenses deliver high-resolution images across centimetre-scale tissues, and across virtually any common sample-preparation method, with no hardware changes."
Practical Applications
Using this concept, the Tomer-led team built a compact add-on device that plugs into existing microscopes already present in labs worldwide, and a higher-resolution version called "Super-Scope". They also integrated the technology into a small, commercially available microscope called "Slice", which Tomer's group developed in 2024 and was covered by the TOI in its Sept 9, 2024 issue. The team used the technology to image whole mouse, salamander and cavefish brains, lab-grown miniature human brain tissues and real human cancer biopsies in full 3D.
As per a statement by Columbia University, traditionally, doctors and researchers have examined thin, flat slices of tissue on glass slides, like looking at one floor of a building instead of the entire structure. This new technology lets them see the architecture at once, revealing biological details that flat images simply miss.
Hanina Hibshoosh, professor of pathology and cell biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, who co-authored the paper, said, "Examining 3D images of tissues lets you see the whole tissue architecture... Tools like pLSM-Scope that make this kind of imaging affordable will become increasingly important as AI helps us analyse ever-larger amounts of tissue data for diagnosis and prognosis."
