Current biomedical imaging and intuiting technologies embody computerized tomography, captivating inflection imaging, visual conformity tomography, spectroscopy, and ultrasound, to name usually a few.
These technologies are during a intersection of a earthy sciences, mathematics, mechanism science, and engineering. Columbia Engineering is home to many imaging and intuiting labs, some of that combine with labs during Columbia University Medical Center. Our researchers are regulating biomedical imaging and intuiting to investigate all from a growth of synthetic prophesy systems to bone biomechanics.
Sometimes they work in partnership with record companies to rise new imaging and intuiting techniques. In a consistent feedback loop, expertise and researchers pursue technological advances to prove unmet systematic and clinical needs; a new technologies afterwards open their eyes to serve questions to explore.
Developing Optical Tools for Surgical Guidance
Early in her investigate career, Christine Hendon was drawn to biomedical optics; she was intrigued by this medical record that did not rest on radiation. Today, her altogether idea is to rise visual collection for surgical guidance.
“We wish to rise visual collection that yield a surgeon with a transparent bargain of a tissue,” says Hendon, partner highbrow of electrical engineering. Her techniques essentially use near-infrared spectroscopy and visual conformity tomography (OCT), that has been dubbed “optical ultrasound.”
So-called visual biopsies would offer many aloft fortitude than stream biopsy surrogates such as MRIs, PET tomography, and ultrasound. A intensity advantage of OCT is that a surgeon would be means to picture a far-reaching area of hankie and, distinct with invasive biopsies, mislay as small hankie as possible.
Currently, a categorical focus of Hendon’s investigate is focusing on OCT in a diagnosis of heart arrhythmias, or strange heart rhythms. A common diagnosis is ablation, in that a surgeon uses a catheter to detect aberrant electrical signals and afterwards relates radiofrequency appetite to mislay injure hankie in a malfunctioning area.
Hendon is also regulating spectroscopy to yield real-time information during surgery. Especially critical is a abyss of a lesion — a ablated, or dead, hankie area. “Frequently,” says Hendon, “patients who have ablation lapse for a second procedure. We wish that a use of spectroscopy will revoke both procession time and a series of repeat procedures.”
In late July, Hendon did a initial in vivo contrast of a spectroscopy catheter on an animal model.
Hendon’s organisation is building an atlas of OCT heart images. So far, a atlas includes 25 tellurian hearts, with 15 volumes (600 images per volume) for any heart. Eventually, a atlas will be used to sight cardiologists.
An arriving plan focuses on a use of visual collection in breast cancer. Hendon is operative with breast surgeon Sheldon Feldman and pathologist Hanina Hibshoosh during Columbia University Medical Center to brand tumors localized to a duct. Eventually, they will picture lesions over time to establish that are expected to swell to cancer.
Hendon is also collaborating with associate Columbia Engineering highbrow Kristin Myers on regulating imaging to consider a automatic properties of a cervix in propinquity to preterm birth.
Hendon is committed to enlivening STEM education among youth. At Columbia, she hosts campus visits by middle-school students — who leave with OCT images of their finger. “Middle propagandize kids are great,” she said. “They don’t demur to ask questions.”
Image Analysis for Both Diagnosis and Treatment Design
In a mid-1980s, Andrew Laine was a connoisseur student during Washington University, in St. Louis — and a expert hacker. At a time, a 3 vital manufacturers of medical imaging apparatus used opposite encrypted (proprietary) codes for breast captivating inflection imaging (MRI) scans. At his adviser’s prompting, Laine burst a codes, so a information from a several machines could be integrated and a images compared and studied. “Later,” he says, “the sovereign supervision systematic imaging manufacturers to adopt a common standard, so images could be common among VA hospitals.” The outcome was Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM).
International politics played a purpose in last Laine’s subsequent step. With a fall of a Soviet Union, a U.S. army had a over-abundance in a invulnerability budget, including $20 million for medical investigate on women’s diseases. Laine due a process to raise mammograms, to residence a problem of manifest lesions being ignored in screening. His record was ranked a many earnest in a program, and he perceived a $2 million extend for mammography research.
Laine, who is chair of a Department of Biomedical Engineering, with a corner appointment in Radiology during Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC), was a initial to request methods of multiscale “wavelet” representations to raise pointed sum in mammograms so they would not be missed. This not usually constructed improved images, though also reduced a volume of deviation indispensable for screening. Today, a core algorithm he grown in 1992 is used in roughly all blurb digital mammography systems worldwide.
Using a phased array ultrasound transducer, Laine was also a initial to discriminate cardiac strain, that can be a predecessor to a heart attack, in genuine time, from 4D (3D and time) ultrasound. The 4D imaging can also detect aberrant wall suit of passed myocardial hankie ensuing from a heart conflict that has already occurred.
“Fostering a attribute between academia and industry,” Laine says, “is a fastest approach to move technical advances in imaging to clinical use and urge studious care.” Laine spearheaded a partnership between Columbia and General Electric (GE) to encourage translational research. It enables biomedical engineers, clinicians, and GE to jointly residence unmet clinical needs that could advantage from advances in MRI record and other imaging methods.
Laine is also requesting a wavelet technique he devised for mammography to pulmonary emphysema, a form of ongoing opposed pulmonary illness (COPD). Conventional computed tomography (CT) methods specify a patient’s illness as one of 3 subtypes. In partnership with Graham Barr, MD (CUMC), Laine’s lab is assisting to exhibit underlying illness stages of COPD by expanding a series of imaging phenotypes used as biomarkers.
By regulating 3D imaging of CT information and tens of thousands of CT lung scans, and tracking thousands of patients over a decade, Laine has detected a richer set of 60-80 subtypes of emphysematic tissue.
Laine is also operative with Professors George Hripcsak and Larry Schwartz during CUMC. Their investigate will concede clinicians to investigate a patient’s story regulating both content (electronic health record) and annotated commentary subsequent from medical images. This partnership adds a new dimension of imaging informatics — including radiomics (the descent and research of quantitative facilities of images) — to pointing medicine, furthering the ability to know illness processes, emanate new therapies, and improved envision studious outcome.
