MariPen Yeatts is a Biomedical Engineering PhD candidate in the laboratory of Taner Akkin at the University of Minnesota. The Akkin Lab develops non-contact optical imaging technologies designed to study tissue structure and function with high spatiotemporal resolution. A particular emphasis of the lab is neural imaging, including optical tractography of the brain and optical detection of action potentials. Because these techniques operate in reflection geometry, they enable non-invasive or minimally invasive medical applications.

MariPen has pioneered the development of a large-scale polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) imaging platform capable of imaging whole primate and human brains at micron-scale resolution. PS-OCT is a label-free imaging modality that exploits birefringence-based contrast to visualize highly ordered microstructures, such as myelinated axon bundles, without the need for exogenous stains or markers.

To enable these large-scale imaging studies, MariPen utilizes a custom large-diameter Compresstome® vibratome (VF-800-0Z) to section human brain tissue. The ability to generate uniform, high-quality precision-cut sections from large specimens is critical for preserving structural integrity and ensuring accurate orientation mapping across extended tissue volumes.

In this webinar, MariPen will:

•Provide an overview of optical coherence tomography (OCT) and the principles underlying polarization-sensitive OCT (PS-OCT)
•Explain how birefringent properties of neural tissue generate intrinsic imaging contrast
•Discuss tissue management and handling strategies before, during, and after sectioning and imaging
•Demonstrate how PS-OCT can be used to map axonal bundle orientation in large-scale human brain specimens