An ECE PhD student, Mr. Zhanshi YAO, supervised by Prof. Andrew Poon, won the Best Student Paper Award
An ECE PhD student, Mr. Zhanshi YAO, supervised by Prof. Andrew Poon, won the Best Student Paper Award (2nd runner up) in the 18th IEEE Photonics Society Hong Kong Chapter Postgraduate Conference, held on December 15, 2017 at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His award-winning paper is titled, "Vertically Embedded Multimode-Interference Waveguide-Based Optical Stretchers for Mechanical Characterization of Cells."
This annual conference is organized by the IEEE Photonics Society Hong Kong Chapter with five participating universities including The University of Hong Kong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The City University of Hong Kong, The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Nowadays, the ability to non-invasively manipulate biological cells and characterize their mechanical characteristics potentially offers high-impact applications in the biomedical area. The mechanical properties of red blood cells (RBCs) provide critical indicators for the health condition of human body. This work reports the successful demonstration of an integrated, miniaturized optofluidic platform to non-invasively manipulate RBCs and characterize their shape deformability with a throughput much higher than the throughput of conventional optical force-based techniques, using the optical lattice generated from vertically embedded polymer-in-silicon multimode-interference waveguides. This technique paves the way for future opto-mechanical-based cell disease diagnoses.
