Biomedical Imaging and Its Translation and Application

A special issue of Photonics (ISSN 2304-6732). This special issue belongs to the section "Biophotonics and Biomedical Optics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 June 2027 | Viewed by 511

Editor


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Guest Editor
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China
Interests: medical imaging; nanomedical imaging probe; optical and photoacoustic molecular imaging
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Biomedical imaging has become an indispensable tool in modern medicine and life sciences, offering unprecedented insights into biological structures, functions, and disease mechanisms. Despite remarkable advances in imaging technologies—ranging from super-resolution microscopy and photoacoustic imaging to multimodal and molecular imaging—significant gaps remain between laboratory innovation and real-world clinical or industrial application. Challenges such as limited spatial/temporal resolution, lack of standardized protocols, high system complexity, and insufficient validation in physiologically relevant models continue to hinder translation.

This Special Issue, "Biomedical Imaging and Its Translation and Application," aims to bridge the gap between cutting-edge imaging technology development and its practical deployment in preclinical research, clinical diagnosis, therapeutic monitoring, and image-guided interventions. We invite contributions that address not only novel imaging techniques but also studies emphasizing validation, scalability, regulatory pathways, or cost-effectiveness analysis. Both fundamental and applied research are welcome.

Scope includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • Novel optical, ultrasound, MRI, PET, CT, and hybrid imaging systems;
  • Molecular probes, contrast agents, and targeted imaging strategies;
  • Image reconstruction, processing, and AI/ML-assisted analysis;
  • Intraoperative, point-of-care, and portable imaging devices;
  • Imaging biomarkers for early diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment response;
  • Translational studies using animal models, organoids, or clinical specimens;
  • Regulatory considerations, standardization, and clinical trial design for imaging;
  • Image-guided therapy, robotics, and interventional applications.

We welcome original research articles, comprehensive reviews, technical notes, and perspective pieces. Submissions that demonstrate clear translational pathways or address unmet clinical needs will be prioritized.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Jingqin Chen
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Photonics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • biomedical imaging
  • translational research
  • clinical application
  • multimodal imaging
  • molecular imaging
  • image-guided intervention
  • diagnostic imaging
  • imaging biomarkers
  • point-of-care
  • artificial intelligence

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

33 pages, 15128 KB  
Article
EndoDGS: Degradation-Decoupled Gaussian Splatting for Endoscopic Novel-View Reconstruction
by Jiahong Dong, Hongshuai Qin, Xingru Huang, Zhiwen Zheng, Lihuan Shao, Huiyu Qi, Xiaoshuai Zhang and Jin Liu
Photonics 2026, 13(7), 671; https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics13070671 - 14 Jul 2026
Viewed by 320
Abstract
Reliable three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction from endoscopic video is essential for endoscopic digital twins, scene review, and minimally invasive visual analysis. However, endoscopic images are not clean observations of intrinsic tissue appearance. Depth-dependent blur, shallow mucosal color diffusion, wet-surface specular reflection, and frame-wise color [...] Read more.
Reliable three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction from endoscopic video is essential for endoscopic digital twins, scene review, and minimally invasive visual analysis. However, endoscopic images are not clean observations of intrinsic tissue appearance. Depth-dependent blur, shallow mucosal color diffusion, wet-surface specular reflection, and frame-wise color variation are often coupled with the captured signal. When such observation-dependent effects are directly optimized as Gaussian colors, conventional 3D Gaussian Splatting may encode transient imaging artifacts as persistent tissue appearance, leading to blurred textures, color drift, specular residues, and unstable novel-view synthesis. This paper presents EndoDGS (Endoscopic Degradation-Decoupled Gaussian Splatting), a degradation-decoupled Gaussian Splatting framework for endoscopic novel-view reconstruction. The core idea is to keep stable geometry and base tissue appearance in the Gaussian representation, while modeling endoscope-induced degradations separately in a bounded render-space compensation pipeline. EndoDGS combines lightweight appearance modulation for frame-wise color stabilization with sequential degradation compensation for optical blur, mucosal color transport, and wet-surface specular response. This design reduces the entanglement between persistent tissue appearance and transient imaging degradations without changing the underlying Gaussian geometry and visibility ordering. Experiments on synthetic colonoscopy and real endoscopic/laparoscopic datasets covering 38 scenes show that EndoDGS consistently improves reconstruction quality over representative implicit and explicit reconstruction baselines. The results demonstrate that separating stable tissue representation from observation-dependent endoscopic degradations provides a more faithful, stable, and interpretable foundation for endoscopic 3D reconstruction. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Biomedical Imaging and Its Translation and Application)
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