en.Wedoany.com Reported - Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered an optical self-organization phenomenon where lasers can form highly focused "pencil beams" under specific conditions, for use in biological imaging. Utilizing this beam, the team captured 3D images of the human blood-brain barrier, achieving a 25-fold increase in speed compared to traditional methods while maintaining comparable resolution. This technology holds the potential to accelerate the screening of new drugs for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.
"The prevailing view in this field is that if you increase the power of such beam lasers, the light will inevitably become chaotic. But we have demonstrated that this is not the case," said Yu Sixian, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Along with her team, she discovered during experiments that when a beam laser enters a multimode fiber at a zero-degree angle and reaches a critical power, the disordered light self-organizes into a stable pencil beam. Previously, beam scattering under high power was a long-standing challenge, yet the new method requires no complex beam-shaping components.
The pencil beam is not only stable but also offers high resolution and no side-lobe interference. The researchers applied it to imaging the human blood-brain barrier, achieving real-time tracking of the process by which cells absorb drugs. Roger Kamm, a professor at Harvard Medical School, stated: "The ability to visualize drugs entering the brain without the need for fluorescent labeling is a game-changer." The findings were published in *Nature Methods*. In the future, the team plans to investigate its physical mechanisms and extend its application to areas such as neuronal imaging.
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