SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, will launch the new journal Neurophotonics in 2014, covering the optical technologies and methods driving profound advances in understanding brain phenomena such as electrical excitability, neuroglial partnership, neurovascular signaling, metabolic activity, and hemodynamics in health and disease.
David Boas
"As advanced optical methods are driving a revolution in the neurosciences that will persist for decades to come, I am delighted that SPIE is starting Neurophotonics," said editor-in-chief David Boas of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. "The journal will provide a highly visible focal point to facilitate and accelerate the rapidly expanding impact of this discipline."
Boas said a key goal of the journal will be to foster greater awareness and interaction among the photonics, neuroscience, and clinical communities.
"The use of optics and photonics by the scientific and medical community to deepen our understanding of brain function and dysfunction is an exciting development for our community," said SPIE President Bill Arnold. "Photonics is having an incredibly important impact in medicine and health care. SPIE is pleased to focus even more attention on this exciting field with new conference programs on neurophotonics and optogenetics and now a dedicated Neurophotonics journal."
The SPIE Journal of Biomedical Optics has included papers covering neurophotonics since it was launched in 1996. Its editor-in-chief, Lihong Wang of Washington University in St. Louis, said that the rapid growth and interest in this field has created a distinct need for a spin-off journal focused solely on the application of photonics technology and techniques in brain research.
"I view Neurophotonics as a companion journal and applaud SPIE's commitment to the biomedical community. I also expect this new journal to serve as an interdisciplinary platform for both optical engineers and neuroscientists," Wang said.
Neurophotonics will include contributions covering:
- Microscopic methods
- Super-resolution nanoscopic methods
- Optogenetics and other optical methods of manipulating cellular behavior
- Synthetic and genetically encoded optical reporters and actuators
- Optical clearing methods
- Methods to investigate neuroglial and vascular physiology
- Methods to investigate cellular energetics
- Noninvasive methods of measuring and imaging brain function and physiology
- Photoacoustic methods spanning from optical to acoustic resolution
- Clinical and translation applications
- Computational methods relevant to understanding and interpreting optical measurements.
Authors are invited to submit articles beginning 30 November, with publication to begin in early 2014. More information is at www.spie.org/neurophotonics.
Neurophotonics will be published quarterly both in print and online in the SPIE Digital Library, with each article published online immediately on completion. Articles will be freely available to all readers in 2014.
SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The Society serves nearly 235,000 constituents from approximately 155 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional networking, and patent precedent. SPIE provided over $3.2 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2012.