Dear Colleagues,

Neurophotonics is becoming one of the most important and rapidly evolving subfields in photonics, in which optical/photonic methods/technologies are applied to study the brain at molecular, cellular and tissue levels. Structure­­–function and brain-behavior relationships can now be visualized, often noninvasively, using optical technologies at microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic scales across all species. Our understanding in important fields of neuroscience such as electrical excitability, neuroglial partnership, neurovascular signaling, metabolic activity and hemodynamics in healthy and diseased conditions has also significantly improved due to the development of novel optical technologies.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to provide a vehicle for communicating important advancements in the use of optical methods/technologies to study brain function, organization and structure microscopically, mesoscopically or macroscopically. This Special Issue also welcomes works that explicitly address these questions in animal models or clinical populations. Some representative, but not exhaustive, examples include the development and applications of:

• Advanced optical techniques;
• Imaging and manipulation of neural circuitry;
• Methods to investigate cellular energetics;
• Methods to investigate neuroglial and vascular physiology;
• Microscopy and super-resolution optical microscopy;
• Fluorescence imaging;
• Diffuse optical tomography;
• Near-infrared spectroscopy;
• Diffuse correlation spectroscopy/tomography;
• Fluorescence molecular tomography;
• Molecular imaging and nanotheranostics;
• Multimodal optical imaging;
• Noninvasive methods of measuring and imaging brain function and physiology;
• Optical clearing methods;
• Optogenetics and other optical methods of manipulating cellular behavior;
• Photoacoustic tomography and microscopy;
• Optoacoustic neuromodulation;
• Photodynamic therapy;
• Photoimmunotherapy;
• Photobiomodulation;
• Synthetic and genetically encoded optical reporters and actuators;
• Theoretical and computational optical methods;
• Translational and clinical applications.

We invite you to contribute an original research article or a review to this Special Issue of Photonics, entitled “Progress in Neurophotonics and Its Future Perspectives”.

Prof. Dr. Huabei Jiang
Dr. Dan Wu
Dr. Shixie Jiang
Guest Editors

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