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Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and Aalborg University in Copenhagen have shown that changes can be detected in blood tests up to eight years before a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease and up to three years before a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis.

This means the beginnings of inflammatory diseases start a long time before symptoms occur, and in the future may provide an opportunity for doctors to take preventative action before symptoms begin, or prescribe medication when it will be most effective.

Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are collectively known as inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). They are incurable conditions which involve excessive inflammation in the gut, leading to symptoms like abdominal pain and diarrhea. Early diagnosis and treatment are key to improving outcomes, but nearly a quarter of the 25,000 people diagnosed each year in the UK wait over a year.

Information transfer in free space using ultraviolet, visible, or infrared waves has been gaining interest because of the availability of large bandwidth for high-data-rate communication. However, the presence of opaque occlusions or walls along the path between the transmitter and the receiver often impedes information transfer by blocking the direct line of sight.

In a new article published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the California NanoSystems Institute, led by Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, the Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Dr. Mona Jarrahi, the Northrop Grumman Endowed Chair at UCLA, has reported a fundamentally new method for delivering optical information around arbitrarily shaped opaque occlusions or walls.

This method permits the transmission of optical information, for example, images, around large and dynamically changing opaque occlusions. It is based on digital encoding at the transmitter and diffractive all-optical decoding at the receiver for transferring information around arbitrary opaque occlusions that completely block the direct line of sight between the transmitter and the receiver apertures.