the book explores various aspects of existing and emerging fiber and waveguide optics sensing and imaging technologies including recent advances in nanobiophotonics. the focus is both on fundamental and applied research as well as on applications in civil engineering, biomedical sciences, environment, security and defence. the main goal of the multi-disciplinarry team of editors was to provide an useful reference of state-of-the-art overviews covering a variety of complementary topics on the interface of engineering and biomedical sciences.