How light technology is changing medicine - Sajan Saini
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TEDEd Animation
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It’s an increasingly common sight in hospitals around the world: a nurse measures our height, weight, blood pressure, and attaches a glowing plastic clip to our finger. Suddenly, a digital screen reads out the oxygen level in our bloodstream. How did that happen? Sajan Saini shows how pairing light with integrated photonics is leading to new medical technologies and less invasive diagnostic tools.
In integrated photonics, when light passes through a sample, absorption is a weak effect. That’s because as light travels in a silicon wire, a tiny bit of it “bleeds” out, beyond its surface; when a sample is deposited, it’s this tiny evanescent part of the light that experiences absorption. Now, recall a ring resonator traps light, which means light circulates many times around it before finally escaping. In light of this, can you imagine another role for the ring resonator in Lab-on-a-Chip sensing, besides routing wavelengths of light to detectors? Which role might be more important?
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Meet The Creators
- Educator Sajan Saini
- Director Igor Coric
- Narrator Addison Anderson
- Animator Nemanja Petrovic
- Sound Designer Nemanja Petrovic
- Producer Milica Lapcevic
- Director of Production Gerta Xhelo
- Editorial Producer Alex Rosenthal
- Associate Producer Bethany Cutmore-Scott
- Fact-Checker Eden Girma
