In the search of a brighter future, light helps us towards better health. Dr Shree Krishnamoorthy shares how Light and Biophotonics-based research guide us towards a Brighter Future.
Across cultures light symbolizes knowledge and truth, away from darkness, ignorance, and untruth. Everyday we seek to better ourselves. In this search of a brighter future, light also helps us towards better health.
Our interaction with light is continuous. While light seems to avoid everything to keep up its break-neck pace; things and life very often gets in its way. Light itself consists of a multitude of colours evident in a rainbow that graces the grey sky after a light shower. The rainbow shows, literally, the true colours of light; the violets to the red, and beyond the visible into the ultra-violet and the heat inducing infra-red.
When this light interacts with life, living things and our tissues, it carries the optical fingerprint or spectrum of interaction itself. Think of the sun shining on the fresh-green spring leaves, the light under the leaf is spring-green and nothing like the white sunshine on the top side of it. The leaf absorbs all the colours except green indicating that it is rich in chlorophyll, which is a green pigment used to process light, water and air for making plant food. As the leaves mature the chlorophyll goes through complex chemical transformations, and the bright spring leaves change to autumn’s red leaves.
Like the colours of the leaves, colours in our bodies indicate the state of our health. New summer freckles signify skin adapting to the summer sunshine. An injured black and blue eye indicates that the blood has clotted. Clotting of blood and changing of its colour is because of haemoglobin, the red pigment in blood which carries oxygen to all parts of our body is transforming, much like chlorophyll in leaves.
However, there is only so much that one can discern from the surface, but how does one look deep into the tissue or deep within one’s body? This is where Biophotonics comes into play.
Here we see a fusion of light physics, chemistry of molecules, medical understanding, and engineering ingenuity. In Biophotonics, we develop tools and techniques to see the spectrum of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and others on light deep within the body. The science of reading the optical spectrum is shaping medical diagnosis in the future.
Biophotonics is rapidly evolving from a one-time diagnosis to wearable, continuous health monitoring.
This is what I do: I create devices that use light in ways other than the colors we can see to determine whether a baby is having difficulty getting oxygen from its mother during birth. The device will tell the doctors if the baby is in danger of suffocating with hypoxia and is in need for a Caesarean-section. This is a crucial decision for the baby being born, if hypoxia is not detected, it can cause cerebral palsy even if the baby survives this traumatic episode.
All fields of science have been changing so fast. Physicists have even succeeded in slowing light down so that it can interact with life and matter. Light-based analysis of life molecules, or biomolecules, is uncovering new fingerprints in light. Engineering breakthroughs have resulted in devices the size of a human hair. Biophotonics is bringing these advances to clinics to aid us in our quest for greater health, knowledge, and truth through the use of guiding light.
This article was originally written by Dr Shree Krishnamoorthy for subscribers of Good Day Cork.