Democratizing Access to Macroscopic Bioimaging

This project aims to develop a modular, inexpensive, open-source, multi-modal in vivo imaging system (IVIS). IVIS systems are used to perform 2D or 3D optical imaging of animals and are critical for a range of research areas including drug discovery, cancer biology, and physiological monitoring. However, commercially available IVIS systems are expensive and typically limited in expandability or modularity. These instruments are accessible mostly in imaging core facilities at large universities, limiting use by researchers without these core facilities. This team seeks to democratize this imaging capability by developing and sharing a modular imaging system that is orders of magnitude less expensive than the commercially available systems by leveraging consumer-grade hardware, rapid prototyping approaches, and computational image processing.