Introduction

Since 1994, The Optical Society has organized biennial topical meetings in the field of biomedical optics. There is a history of feature issues for these topical meetings published first in Applied Optics, then in Biomedical Optics Express, and this tradition has been strongly embraced by the biomedical optics community. In 2020, Biomedical Optics Express is celebrating its 10th anniversary. The very first issue in 2010 included papers from the Biomedical Optics Topical Meeting – the predecessor to today’s Biophotonics Congress.

The conference committee and OSA as the host encountered this year the challenge of a global pandemic. OSA took the valiant decision to re-organize the full congress on a virtual platform. Against the odds of different time zones for such an international event, and substantially different presentation formats for the authors, more than 90% of authors were still able under the new circumstances to present their valuable contributions. Innovative events, such as virtual coffee breaks, provided a platform for congress participants to link up with peers and discuss selected topics, for example, in optical coherence tomography (OCT). Thanks to the very professional organization by the OSA staff, the congress has finally been a great success.

The Congress covered a diversity of cutting-edge biophotonic research and innovative new tools and techniques, and brought together an international group of leading engineers, optical and medical scientists, and physicians, including junior researchers and graduate students, who are engaged in optical methods to advance discovery and application of medical science to clinical practice. The congress comprised the four topical meetings: Clinical and Translational Biophotonics co-chaired by Kate Bechtel, Triple Ring Technologies (USA), and Laura Marcu, University of California Davis (USA); Microscopy, Histopathology and Analytics co-chaired by Kevin Eliceiri, University of Wisconsin (USA) and Milind Rajadhyaksha, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (USA); Optical Tomography and Spectroscopy co-chaired by Regine Choe, University of Rochester (USA), and Turgut Durduran, ICFO -Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, (Spain); Optical Coherence Tomography co-chaired by Christine Hendon, Columbia University (USA), and Xingde Li, Johns Hopkins University (USA); and Optics and the Brain co-chaired by Maria Angela Franceschini, Massachusetts General Hospital (USA), and Spencer Smith, University of California Santa Barbara (USA).

In addition to the excellent selection of plenary and invited speaker-led sessions and poster sessions, the meeting was noteworthy for virtual coffee breaks with various topics in the field of OCT such as Image Processing, Machine Learning and Deep Learning, for the networking event for student and early career professional development, for the innovation challenge event, as well as the workshop on Understanding Peer Review and Publishing.

The 30 papers published in this feature issue of Biomedical Optics Express cover a representative cross section of research presented at this year’s meeting [1]. The editors of this feature issue and organizers of the conference would like to take the opportunity to thank the authors and the reviewers for their contributions to the issue, as well as the presenters and attendees of the conference for their scientific presentations and active engagement in discussions which were so essential for the overall success of the Biophotonics Congress.

Finally, the organizers are pleased to invite you to the upcoming Biophotonics Congress: Optics in the Life Sciences currently scheduled to take place through April 12, 2021 - April 15, 2021 in Vancouver, BC, Canada.