Impact of Biomedical Optics and Planning our Revised Scope

Abstract. Journal of Biomedical Optics editor-in-chief Brian W. Pogue outlines a revision of scope for the journal.

The journal must make difficult choices about what we publish in biomedical optics, with the balance shifted towards excellence in technical innovation and discovery rather than biomedical utility and practice. The editorial board recognizes this phenomenon in our own research circles, and we recognize that seeking to publish innovation and discovery that advance capabilities must outweigh publishing scientific observations that merely document measurements.
The numbers show that technical innovations receive higher downloads and citations than biologically driven innovations, and this is in part because of the fact that biologically driven innovations have many more venues for publication, and the best of these latter papers do not get offered to our journal. In every field of medicine and healthcare there are hundreds of journals that publish relevant papers, and newly emerged systems to image, sense, or measure them are part of their mandate. While we want to encourage and apply the use of optical devices in medicine and via commercialization, if these scholarly activities have impact, they should wind up penetrating into the medical field via medical journals that represent them. For the good of the field, we should be actively advocating for the best biomedical papers to be published in the best biomedical journals, and similarly the best technical papers should be published in the best technical journals. JBO has always represented the edge of both fields, but with a center of gravity that places it as a technical journal primarily.
Technical innovations that have biomedical utility as their goal are well placed in our journal and in the SPIE society. It is with this vision that a slightly revised scope for the journal has been approved by the editorial board. This change is a necessary reassessment of our compass, to tack our trajectory towards the best of our field, and one that will ensure the longevity of the journal and the shape of our field.
In summary, the board of editors and the editorial staff of the Journal of Biomedical Optics have approved the following recommendation of a revised scope:

Scope
The Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO) is an open access journal that publishes peer-reviewed papers on innovations in optical systems and techniques that will improve health care and lead to discoveries in biomedical research. Growth in the capabilities of biomedical optical technology has fueled new areas of contrast, resolution, and spectral capacity in imaging and sensing, which have enabled widespread applications throughout biology and medicine. Topics suitable for JBO include significant in-depth studies of: • fundamentally new discoveries in biomedical optical devices for imaging or sensing using: optical spectroscopy, near infrared spectroscopy, photoacoustics, microscopy, optical coherence, tomography, fluorescence, phosphorescence, elastography, hyperspectral, using features unique to optics such as spatial, spectral, temporal, interference, polarization, or quantum nature; • increasing knowledge of light-tissue interaction, through theoretical transport models such as Monte Carlo, diffusion, electromagnetic and empirical methods, and through physical methods to model light-tissue interactions such as tissue-simulating phantoms; • computational advances in optical image and signal processing, and image reconstruction, including new methods in machine learning and artificial intelligence that improve insight into the utility, detection, or performance value; • novel medical optical systems used in definitive animal or human studies or clinical trial testing that can impact the field by their design or the optical innovation, including discoveries and technical advances in optics emerging from mobile, remote, wearable, or implantable technologies that can improve health and wellness; • discoveries in photonics, nanophotonics, plasmonics, biosensors, and optical reporters that have direct relevance to biomedical needs or utility; • hybrid imaging or interventional systems where optics are combined with other tools such as ultrasound, x-rays, magnetic resonance, molecular sensing, or electromagnetics.