Organiser & chair: He Sun
Session title: Computational Microscopy: Physics, Learning, and Inference across Biological Scales
Abstract:
Computational
microscopy is rapidly transforming biological imaging from a hardware-limited measurement process into a joint
inference problem over optics, samples, algorithms, and biological priors. Modern microscopes increasingly rely
on structured illumination, adaptive optics, ptychography, wavefront shaping, light-field acquisition, matrix
imaging, and learned reconstruction to recover high-dimensional biological information beyond the native limits
of resolution, depth, field of view, speed, and photon budget.
This session will
bring together leaders in optical microscopy, wave physics, computational imaging, and bioimage AI to discuss
how physics-based forward models, optimization, statistical inference, and modern machine learning are reshaping
microscopy. The scope spans quantitative phase imaging, Fourier ptychographic microscopy, adaptive optical
microscopy, imaging through scattering media, deep-tissue fluorescence imaging, smart microscopy, and AI-enabled
image restoration and analysis. A central theme is how to make computational microscopy reliable for biological
discovery: how to co-design optics and algorithms, integrate learned priors without hallucination, quantify
uncertainty, and scale methods from controlled phantoms to complex living systems.
By positioning
microscopy as a multidisciplinary inverse problem, the session will connect the BASP communities in
computational imaging theory and biomedical imaging, while also highlighting methodological links to
astronomical imaging, including adaptive optics, phase retrieval, wavefront sensing, and imaging through
turbulence or scattering. The session aims to stimulate discussion on the next generation of microscopes that
are not merely image acquisition devices, but closed-loop, physics-aware, AI-assisted scientific
instruments.