Wearable & Implantable Optical Waveguides
Soroush Shabahang, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School

The rapid advancements in developing new biomedical devices with optical interfaces necessitates the engineering of new optical waveguides and fiber devices with desired optical, mechanical and biological properties. The future medical applications of optical waveguides include diagnostics, drug delivery, phototherapy, wearable devices and optical sensors. Next generation of medical wearable devices will enable long-term monitoring of patient health, collection of functional data to aid diagnoses, and rapid detection of life-threatening conditions. Implantable optical waveguides with specific optical, biological and mechanical properties are of great importance in future photomedicine. Optical fiber sensors with different sensing mechanisms can detect small variations in their surroundings. They can potentially cover large areas and provide higher resolution, speed, and sensitivity than their electronic-based counterparts. Multimaterial fibers with temperature and pressure sensors, conductive electrodes and light guiding cores will deliver optical and electrical signals.
In this presentation I will review the recent advances in implantable and wearable optical waveguides for biomedical applications and will share some of our recent research in this field.

Soroush Shabahang received his PhD in optics from CREOL, the College of Optics & Photonics at the University of Central Florida in 2014. His PhD thesis, supervised by professor Ayman Abouraddy, was on nonlinear optical properties of multi-material fibers. He continued at CREOL as a research scientist and developed the idea of OMNI-resonance in optical micro-resonators. In 2016 he joined the Bio-Optics Lab at Harvard Medical School, as a research fellow working with Prof. Andy Yun. His current research is focused on optical waveguides and devices for biomedical applications. He is the first author and coauthor in 22 journal publications; including:

  • Shabahang, et al., “Controlled fragmentation of multimaterial fibres and films via polymer cold-drawing,” Nature 534, 529 (2016)
  • Shabahang, et al., “Omni-resonant optical micro-cavity,” Scientific reports 7, 10336 (2017)
  • Shabahang, et al., “Light‐guiding biomaterials for biomedical applications,” Advanced Functional Materials 28, 1706635 (2018)
  • Shabahang, et al., “Polyethersulfone optical fibers with thermally induced microbubbles for custom side-scattering profiles,” Optics express 27, 7560 (2019)