PhD Students 

Optical fibre-based measurement techniques have attracted a great deal of attention in a variety of analytical areas such as chemical and biological sensing, environmental monitoring and medical diagnosis. The combination of optical fibres with medical devices provides a unique opportunity for fabrication of devices capable of measuring not only physiological parameters (heart rate, blood flow, respiratory) but also the biochemistry of the human body. This PhD project will focus on interdisciplinary research that combines development and fabrication of sensing techniques based upon optical fibre sensors with medical devices such as catheters and needles. The optical fibre sensors will be used to measure in real time various physiological parameters and biochemistry of the human body. The work will also investigate development of fibre-optic chemical sensors utilising long period gratings and methods for the deposition of polymer thin films followed by their characterization. The devices produced, will be developed in close collaboration with clinicians at Nottingham University Hospitals Trust as part of the Centre for Healthcare Technologies.

Oesophageal cancer and colon cancer have low five-year survival rates. This is due in part to poor early detection during endoscopic screening, with conventional endoscopes providing insufficient information to spot a wide range of tumours. Specific absorption and reduced scattering properties are known to be linked to malignancies in the oesophagus, and shape is an important indicator in colon cancer. This project looks at Spatial Frequency Domain Imaging (SFDI) as an alternative imaging technique that can measure absorption and reduced scattering coefficients, as well as shape, as potential indicators of cancer. We aim to develop a type of low-cost capsule endoscope which uses SFDI to image the gastrointestinal tract for indicators of early-stage cancer.  

Working as part of the InLightenUs Project. The aim is to develop the technology required to image deep into the human body using light and optics, improving the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer, ​osteoarthritis, and osteoporosis. Aberrations and scattering cause image quality to dramatically deteriorate when imaging deeper into tissue. The aim is to correct for these aberrations and recover lost information. The emphasis is on developing fast and robust approaches that can be translated into a healthcare setting. 

This research consists of developing continuous physiological monitoring devices to reduce the risk of irreversible disease persistence, incorporating the latest advances in optoelectronics and material processing with source/detector optimisation and Machine Learning algorithms to predict physiological parameters. 

The research involves the development of optical fibre sensors to monitor parameters such as humidity and pH to provide better prognosis of healing.

A plastic optical fibre humidity sensor has been developed. This sensor was coated with a hydrophilic film based on PAH/SiO₂ nanoparticles. The sensor has demonstrated a more accurate response over humidity changes on skin compared with a commercial sensor. Further work will include the miniaturization of the electronic system to analyse the data obtained in order to provide measurements in real-time and embedding the optical fibre sensor within a textile in order to provide measurements on the wound area. 

The research is focused on advanced opto-acoustic transducer technology for the development of very high resolution ultrasonic imaging.

If the frequency goes up to the GHz region then the wavelength of the ultrasound becomes smaller than that of light and there is potential to create ultrasonic imaging systems with greater resolution than that of optical microscopes. The aim is to explore advanced optoacoustic transducer technology to improve the lateral resolution and control of nano-scale ultrasonic imaging.We are eager to use photonic nanostructures that permit the generation and detection of sub-optical acoustic fields with optical techniques. We want to use metallic nanoshells, nanoparticles and metallic nanoarrays to overcome the limit of lateral resolution. A new state-of-art electron beam lithography tool will be installed for making nanostructures, an ineteresting  part of the project

Unlike traditional light microscopes which produce images of a sample’s optical properties, the focus of this PhD is on developing an impedance microspectroscopy technique which instead generates images of a sample's electrical properties. The electrical properties present a largely untapped reservoir of information relating to both cell structure and function; information that is expected to prove invaluable across a multitude of disciplines relating to cell biology. This technique achieves highly accurate and reliable impedance information, with a sub-micrometer resolution that promises to help solve the unanswered questions concerning sub-cellular electrical behaviour

This PhD study will investigate nanometer scale opto-acoustic nanoresonators (primarily photonic crystal resonators).

The wavefront shaping approaches will be developed using a laser scanning second harmonic and 1P and 2P fluorescence microscope. It is starting with optimisation-based adaptive optics approaches and moving from this to techniques that reduce iteration number and are able to predict the correction required from a minimal number of aberrations. This move will be done using machine learning in collaboration with Computer Science.   

Ultra-thin optical fibre imaging technology has significant potential to enable next-generation medical endoscopes that provide high image resolution in difficult-to-access parts of the body such as blood vessels or the brain. The motivation of this project is to build advanced real-time fibre imaging reconstruction algorithms based on single-ended fibre systems that can largely reduce the computational intensity and maintain the advantage of requiring only proximal facet access and supporting arbitrary fibre matrices. This project shows significant promises for future near real-time image reconstruction systems using ultra-thin optical fibres.