Current Projects and Recent Highlights

Terabotics

Terabotics is an £8 programme grant funded by the EPSRC spanning 3 universities, Warwick, Leeds and Exeter. Prof Emma MacPherson is the PI. The vision of the project is to integrate THz probes with robotics for more automated, repeatable and accurate THz sensing. The project started in 2021 and will continue until 2026. More information about Terabotics can be found on the Terabotics website.

In vivo THz sensing

Terahertz light is strongly absorbed by water; this is both a blessing and a curse! As although the THz signal is strongly attenuated by the presence of water, it also very sensitive to subtle changes in water content, such as applying skin products or even those that occur in biome

Photo of the optical set up for THz ellipsometry

dical tissues due to the presence of a tumour or other abnormality. We have been employing THz sensing to quantify properties of skin such as hydration, diffusivity, occlusion rate and most recently, the THz birefringence. Our cunning instrumentation approach for in vivo THz ellipsometry is explained in our recent publication and shows that human skin has non-zero birefringence.

Exploiting Complementary Terahertz Ellipsometry Configurations to Probe the Hydration and Cellular Structure of Skin In Vivo

As well as variables associated with in vivo imaging such as contact pressure, duration of measurement, environmental conditions, whether the subject has eaten, exercised and the time of day will also affect the THz response of the skin. We explain how to account for all these factors in the following paper:

A Robust Protocol for In Vivo THz Skin Measurements

High speed THz imaging

Ultimately, if THz imaging is to be used in vivo it needs to be faster. To this end we have developed a single pixel THz camera, able to achieve 32 × 32 pixels at 6 frames-per-second which is orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art.

Real-time terahertz imaging with a single-pixel detector
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16370-x