PHOTOACOUSTICS/PCF: Leibinger prizes honor work important to biomedicine

Nov. 13, 2014

Trumpf awarded its biennial Berthold Leibinger Zukunftpreis and Innovationspreis in September 2014 to celebrate outstanding development and scientific work on the application or generation of laser light.

Trumpf (Ditzingen, Germany) awarded its biennial Berthold Leibinger Zukunftpreis (Future Prize) and Innovationspreis (Innovation Prize) in September 2014 to celebrate outstanding development and scientific work on the application or generation of laser light.

The first prize winner of the 2014 Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis, chosen by a jury of 11 judges from among 32 applications, was Dr. Alexander A. Oraevsky, President and CEO of TomoWave Laboratories (Houston, TX), for development of its Laser Optoacoustic Imaging System (LOIS-3D). TomoWave is an R&D company with expertise in biomedical devices based on laser optoacoustics (aka photoacoustics) and laser ultrasonics for imaging, sensing, and monitoring. LOIS-3D is the first system of its kind to produce comprehensive information based on volumetric optoacoustic tomography depicting absorbed optical energy (blood distribution and its oxygenation). The result is a rich set of complementary anatomical and functional 3D images.

Also important for biomedical research is photonic-crystal fiber (PCF), invention of the 2014 Zukunftspreis winner, British physicist Prof. Philip Russell, now at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (Erlangen, Germany).