Although many studies suggested that cancerous prostate presents distinct membrane potential, there is currently no active translational research to turn this concept into cancer detection. One of the limitations is the fact that there is no established stimulation protocol and no non-invasive recording of the membrane potential. Ultrasound stimulation has the potential to be the…
Category: Projects
Our preliminary data suggest that neurons exposed to hypoxic injury respond differently to ultrasound-induced stimulation compared to sham treated neurons. Based on these findings we hypothesize that: non-invasive neuromodulation is a tool for functional evaluation of neural injury. The use of ultrasound neuromodulation as a functional interrogation tool to measure the severity of neural injury…
Our innovative research is focused on determining if US tomography-based thermometry in combination with thermal and acoustic modelling can be sufficient to replace MR thermometry and hence devising a system that can perform the same safe and effective uterine fibroid ablations without the need for costly MRI. Our developed system leverages existing HIFU systems by…
This project leverages our research outcome from RT-II. Our novel approach devises a new functional imaging technology to visualize a nerve map in a non-intrusive way during robotic-assisted radial proctectomy (RaRP). Our proposed imaging technology leverages the state-of-the-art VSD and electrical erectile stimulation. We anticipate that the successful development and deployment of the proposed approach…
Needles, guidewires, and catheters represent some of the most used daily instruments by interventional radiologists. Catheters are commonly tracked with either an imaging modality such as X-ray fluoroscopy or a tracking system such as electromagnetic (EM) trackers. X-ray delivers a radiation dosage to the patient for a non-therapeutic purpose; and an EM tracker places certain…
We have developed a molecular PA imaging system capable of visualizing PSMA molecular contrast in vivo. We have designed a series of PA imaging contrast agents composed of three functional parts (Figure 1). The middle component is a linker that tethers the PSMA ligand to bulky optical dyes such as IRDye800CW, ICG, and Alexafluor750, which…
The feasibility of transcranial functional PA imaging of cerebral oxygenation in the piglet brain (5-day old, 2kg) was demonstrated (Figure 1a). Multi-spectral PA data were collected (700-900 nm in 10-nm intervals) while applying various fractional inspired oxygen (FiO2) levels to induce graded hypoxia. The ground-truth sO2 was also measured by direct sampling of venous blood…
PA imaging has a potential to sense the electrophysiological state of biological tissue. Voltage sensitive dyes are designed to monitor membrane potential by detecting fluorescence changes in response to neuronal or muscle electrical activity. Through our collaboration with Prof. Les Loew (University of Connecticut) who pioneered VSD synthesis, we have reported the first PA VSD…
Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) offers quantitative anatomical tissue characterization for cancer detection. While most research and commercial development has focused on submerging target anatomy in a transducer-lined cylindrical water tank, this is not practical for imaging deep anatomy, so an alternative approach using aligned abdominal and endoluminal ultrasound probes is required. We propose a new…
Synthetic aperture is a signal processing technique used to increase image resolution by synthesizing information from multiple subapertures, but the resolution improvement is limited by the physical size of the array transducer. Our co-robotic approach extends the effective aperture size by providing accurate tracking information and force-control compensation in a rapid execution.This concept can be…