Course Advanced In-vivo Optical Imaging Techniques

The course B273/06 Advanced In-vivo Optical Imaging Techniques is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, fall 2025.

Criteria for participation:  University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students).

Requirements for participation: The student should have a background within the biomedical sciences or medicine. The student should have fundamental physiological and anatomical knowledge.

Aim: To introduce advanced optical techniques for in vivo imaging and how these can be applied in research projects.

Learning outcomes: 

• The students should be able to understand the basis of different techniques, to learn their pitfalls, advantages and disadvantages, and to plan research projects applying these techniques.
• The participants should be able to identify which processing analysis is required for in-vivo imaging.

Workload: The full workload of the course is expected to be 105 hours

Content: 

Day 1: Course introduction and theoretical lectures introducing techniques.

Concepts Light transmission and Lasers, Multiphoton Microscopy, Speckle Imaging, In-vivo monitoring and imaging. Introduction to group work and blended learning, and assignment of supervisor.

Project Assignment: During these three weeks, the students will be divided into 4 groups of 4 students. The task of each group is to make a project-plan for a study employing one or more of the techniques introduced on the course. The plan should include a detailed description of the hypothesis to be tested, the experimental setup, and references as would be required for a grant-proposal to a major foundation. Each group will be assigned a supervisor among the teachers at the course.  The final project must be posted on Brightspace one week before the last session to allow time for peer feedback. Thus, each group should post a series of questions to another group and provide online feedback. Each group can choose to answer the questions online but must address them in the final presentation.

Blended Teaching (4 hrs.): Each student will be assigned to analyze a data set acquired during the workshops, using one or more of the software tools provided for data analysis. A teacher will be available to support troubleshooting for each software tool presented. Each participant will prepare a small report and post it in a Discussion Forum on Brightspace. Each participant is required to comment on and provide feedback for the analyses of two other participants.

Day 2:  Two laboratory practical (demonstration/hands-on).

Day 3: Two laboratory practical (demonstration/hands-on)

Day 4: 1-day seminars. Presentation of on-going research projects using these techniques and examples of data analysis.

Day 5: Group assignment evaluation (peer learning).

Not scheduled: Literature reading and home assignment (group work).

Instructors: 

From Dept. of Clinical Medicine (CFIN): Dmitry Postnov, Vitalii Dashkovski, Mia Viuff Skøtt, Rasmus, Markus Baun-Mikkelsen

From Dept. Biomedicine: Vladimir Matchkov, Line Mathilde Brostrup Hansen, Søren Degn, Layla Pohl, Anders M Kristensen, Sebastian Frische, Ina M Schiessl, Eugenio Gutierrez

From Dept. Molecular Biology and Genetics: Yuya Hayashi

Venue: Aarhus University, Aarhus

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Health Research Year students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses

Course dates:

• 18 August 2025 09:00 - 15:30
• 19 August 2025 09:30 - 15:30
• 20 August 2025 09:30 - 15:30
• 21 August 2025 09:00 - 15:30
• 12 September 2025 10:00 - 14:00