The College of Engineering and Computer Science’s Biomedical and Chemical Engineering department will host “Photoacoustic Tomography: Ultrasonically Beating Optical Diffusion and Diffraction,” as part of the BMCE Distinguished Lecture Series on Friday, Sept. 12, in 001 Life Science Complex, from 1-2 p.m.
Lihong Wang
In the presentation, Lihong Wang of Washington University in St. Louis will explain how photoacoustic tomography uses light and sound to create high resolution, 3-D imaging of the brain. This can be used to better study the brain’s inner workings and detect brain tumors earlier without posing the health risks of x-ray radiation.
The seminar is open to anyone interested in learning more about photoacoustic tomography. For more information, please contact Dawn Long in the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering at dmlong@syr.edu or 315-443-4575.
Please note that the location of this event has changed from 105 Link Hall to 001 Life Sciences complex to accommodate a larger audience.
Photoacoustic tomography has been developed for in vivo functional, metabolic, molecular and histologic imaging by physically combining non-ionizing optical and ultrasonic waves. Broad applications include early-cancer detection and brain imaging. Unlike ionizing x-ray radiation, non-ionizing optical waves pose no health hazard and reveal biochemical contrast. Unfortunately, optical waves do not penetrate biological tissue in straight paths as x-rays do. Consequently, high-resolution optical imaging—such as confocal microscopy, two-photon microscopy and optical coherence tomography—is limited to superficial imaging within the optical diffusion limit (~1 mm in the skin or ~2 mm in the brain) of the surface of scattering tissue. Ultrasonic imaging, on the contrary, provides deep penetration and high spatial resolution but suffers strong speckle artifacts as well as poor contrast in early-stage tumors. By synergistically combining light and sound, photoacoustic tomography provides deep penetration at high ultrasonic resolution and yields speckle-free images with high optical contrast.
Wang earned his Ph.D. at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He currently holds the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professorship of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. His book entitled “Biomedical Optics: Principles and Imaging,” one of the first textbooks in the field, won the 2010 Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award. He also coauthored a book on polarization and edited the first book on photoacoustic tomography.
Wang has published 400 peer-reviewed journal articles and delivered 390 keynote, plenary or invited talks. His Google Scholar h-index and citations have reached 90 and 31,000, respectively. His laboratory was the first to report functional photoacoustic tomography, 3D photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), the photoacoustic Doppler effect, photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography, the universal photoacoustic reconstruction algorithm, frequency-swept ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing, sonoluminescence tomography, Mueller-matrix optical coherence tomography, optical coherence computed tomography and oblique-incidence reflectometry.
