Terahertz (THz) technology offers novel opportunities in biology and medicine, thanks to the unique features of THz-wave interactions with tissues and cells. Among them, we particularly notice strong sensitivity of THz waves to the tissue water, as a medium for biochemical reactions and a main endogenous marker for THz spectroscopy and imaging. Tissues of the brain have an exceptionally high content of water. This factor, along with the features of the structural organization and biochemistry of neuronal and glial tissues, makes the brain an exciting subject to study in the THz range. In this paper, progress and prospects of THz technology in neurodiagnostics are overviewed, including diagnosis of neurodegenerative disease, myelin deficit, tumors of the central nervous system (with an emphasis on brain gliomas), and traumatic brain injuries. Fundamental and applied challenges in study of the THz-wave – brain tissue interactions and development of the THz biomedical tools and systems for neurodiagnostics are discussed.

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) has been widely applied in the superresolution imaging of subcellular dynamics in live cells. Higher spatial resolution is expected for the observation of finer structures. However, further increasing spatial resolution in SIM under the condition of strong background and noise levels remains challenging. Here, we report a method to achieve deep resolution enhancement of SIM by combining an untrained neural network with an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework, i.e., ADMM-DRE-SIM. By exploiting the implicit image priors in the neural network and the Hessian prior in the ADMM framework associated with the optical transfer model of SIM, ADMM-DRE-SIM can further realize the spatial frequency extension without the requirement of training datasets. Moreover, an image degradation model containing the convolution with equivalent point spread function of SIM and additional background map is utilized to suppress the strong background while keeping the structure fidelity. Experimental results by imaging tubulins and actins show that ADMM-DRE-SIM can obtain the resolution enhancement by a factor of ∼1.6 compared to conventional SIM, evidencing the promising applications of ADMM-DRE-SIM in superresolution biomedical imaging.

荧光辐射差分(FED)显微术利用实心光斑扫描的一幅共聚焦图像减去空心光斑扫描的负共聚焦图像,实现了超分辨成像。使用简单的环形光瞳滤波器提高了无变形FED的成像分辨率。在空心焦斑光路上使用合适的环形光瞳滤波器,压缩空心焦斑的尺寸;同时,在实心焦斑的光路上允许使用更高数值孔径的孔径光阑,获得更小的、与空心焦斑相匹配的实心光斑分布:两方面作用下,提高了FED的空间分辨率。