Dr. Wenxuan Liang received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees both in Biomedical Engineering (BME) from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and his PhD degree from the prestigious BME program of the Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA. Following his postdoc training at the Zuckerman Institute of Columbia University, New York, USA, he joined the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) as a research professor, affiliated with both the School of Physical Sciences (located at Hefei, Anhui), and the School of Biomedical Engineering at Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research (SIAR) of USTC.

Dr. Liang has been developing enabling optical microscopy and endoscopy methods and devices for in vivo biomedical imaging since his PhD study. He has published more than 20 papers on peer-reviewed journals including Nature Biomedical Engineering, Light: Science and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, etc., leading to an h-index of 17 in Google scholar.

Research at Dr. Liang’s lab is highly interdisciplinary and collaborative, ranging from image science, physics (especially optics and photonics), and engineering to a plethora of biological and medical applications. The central goal of our team is to develop innovative, enabling optical imaging technologies and solutions to advance fundamental biology and neuroscience research as well as to prompt translational applications. Students and young scientists who share the same dream, regardless of training background, are welcome to reach out and join us!

Email: wenxuan_liang(AT)ustc.edu.cn

Address: 188 Ren’ai Road, Sixian 414, Suzhou, Jiangsu, 215123, P.R.China

Lab website: https://faculty.ustc.edu.cn/liangwenxuan/en/index.htm

ORCID：https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9143-7256

Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=z8leM-0AAAAJ&hl=en

Honors & Awards

Past Research

         During my PhD study advised by Prof. Xingde Li at Johns Hopkins University, I developed a high-performance two-photon-excitation (2PE) endomicroscope that features a miniature fiber-optic scanning head (~2 mm in diameter, < 1 gram in weight) but enables histological and metabolic imaging with sub-cellular resolution of label-free internal organs/tissues, in vivo, in situ, and in real time.

         In specific, my main achievements include:

         A. Enhanced the imaging signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the 2PE endomicroscope by 20- to 50-fold compared to prior art. Through a series of physics and engineering innovations, my design solved the long-standing SNR bottleneck of fiber-optic endomicroscopy, achieved unprecedented endomicroscopic imaging quality that rivals a bench-top 2PE counterpart, and enabled 2PE autofluorescence structural and functional imaging of unstained biological tissues in vivo. (Light: Science & Applications, 2017, DOI:10.1038/lsa.2017.82)

         B. Invented the strategy of cascaded NA amplification which enables 2nd-generation 2PE endomicroscope designs with more than 3-fold enhanced field-NA-speed product. This new strategy breaks the trade-off among imaging field, resolution and speed associated with the original endomicroscope design, thereby enabling either ~9-fold increase in field area or ~3-fold acceleration in frame rate without sacrificing resolution. (IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2020, DOI: 10.1109/TMI.2020.3005067)

         C. Integrated label-free functional imaging modalities—optical redox ratio and NADH fluorescence lifetime—into the 2PE endomicroscopy system. Preliminary data demonstrated that the 2PE endomicroscope could detect the fluctuation of cellular redox ratio in a live mouse kidney during the acute ischemia-reperfusion process, and the dynamic change of free and bound NADH concentrations in mouse subcutaneous tumor models subject to induced apoptosis. Such functional information embedded in a structural context is highly valuable for early diagnosis and therapy guidance. (ACS Photonics, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.2c01493)   

For my postdoctoral training, I joined Prof. Elizabeth Hillman’s lab at Columbia University to further develop a novel single-objective light-sheet microscopy method, named swept confocally-aligned planar excitation (SCAPE) microscope, pioneered by Prof. Hillman.

My main contributions include:

A. Invented a fiber-optic taper-based trans-medium intermediate image coupling scheme which solved the long-standing collection efficiency bottleneck of mesoscale SCAPE microscopy, and enabled high-speed mesoscale volumetric imaging (~10 volume/s) across a 4 × 4 × 0.4 mm³ field with micron-level 3D resolution.

B. Designed and built a prototype mini-mediSCAPE microscope with an ~5-fold smaller form factor but similar collection efficiency and 3D resolution as the benchtop counterpart. The outstanding practical advantage here is that the high volumetric rate ensures substantial spatial overlap between successive volumes acquired as the doctor sweeps the probe freely across the undulating tissue surface. From such chains of volumetric datasets, a panoramic ultra-wide 3D field of view can be synthesized using established 3D registration and fusion algorithms even in the presence of involuntary tissue movement or slight trembling of the doctor’s hand. Such excellent robustness against motion artefacts is of significant practical value, but has been lacking in most plane-by-plane imaging mode. See Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2022, DOI:10.1038/s41551-022-00849-7 for details.

Selected Publications

1.         Liang W, Chen D, Guan H, Park HC, Li K, Li A, Li MJ and Li X. Label-Free metabolic imaging in vivo by two-photon fluorescence lifetime endomicroscopy. ACS Photonics, 9(12), 4017-4029 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.2c01493

2.         Patel KB, Liang W, Casper MJ, Voleti V, Zhao HT, Perez-Campos C, Liu JM, Coley SM, and Hillman EMC. High-speed light-sheet microscopy for the in-situ acquisition of volumetric histological images of living tissue. Nature Biomedical Engineering 6, 569-583 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-022-00849-7

3.         Liang W, Park HC, Li K, Li A, Chen D, Guan H, Yue Y, Gau YT, Bergles DE, Li MJ, Lu H, and Li X. Throughput-speed product augmentation for scanning fiber-optic two-photon endomicroscopy. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 39(12), 3779-3787 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1109/TMI.2020.3005067

4.         Li K*, Liang W*, Yang Z, Liang Y, and Wan S. Robust, accurate depth-resolved attenuation characterization in optical coherence tomography. Biomedical Optics Express 11(2), 672-687 (2020) *Equal contribution https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.382493

5.         Voleti V, Patel KB, Li W, Campos CP, Bharadwaj S, Yu H, Ford C, Casper MJ, Yan RW, Liang W, Wen C, Kimura KD, Targoff KL, and Hillman EMC. Real-time volumetric microscopy of in vivo dynamics and large-scale samples with SCAPE 2.0. Nature Methods 16(10), 1054–1062 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-019-0579-4

6.         Li K, Liang W, Mavadia-Shukla J, Park HC, Li D, Yuan W, Wan S, and Li X. Super-achromatic optical coherence tomography capsule for ultrahigh‐resolution imaging of esophagus. Journal of Biophotonics 12(3), e201800205 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1002/jbio.201800205

7.         Liang W*, Hall G*, and Li X. Spectro-temporal dispersion management of femtosecond pulses for fiber-optic two-photon endomicroscopy. Optics Express 26(18), 22877-22893 (2018) *Equal contribution https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.26.022877

8.         Liang W, Hall G, Messerschmidt B, Li MJ, and Li X. Nonlinear optical endomicroscopy for label-free functional histology in vivo. Light: Science and Applications 6, e17082 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1038/lsa.2017.82