Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

In the new era of personalized medicine, many new drugs are proposed and developed based on new therapeutic mechanisms discovered; moreover the treatment strategies may be based on patient genetic information. In this environment, monitoring the patient response to these treatments is of great importance. Ultrasound imaging is fast, inexpensive but lacks good contrast. On the other hand, optical methods have good contrast mechanisms but cannot penetrate tissue well. An emerging imaging method is examined in this work: optoacoustic imaging. In this imaging technique, the body is exposed to very short flashes of light; the ultrasound waves that are produced from the absorption of the light in the body are detected to make an image. This approach takes advantage of the contrast generated by the light and the penetration and speed of ultrasound imaging. In this proposal, we examine optoacoustic imaging for monitoring thermal and radiation therapies. We propose a series of experiments to determine the sensitivity of the technique and to make measurements of optical and mechanical properties of tissue to optimize the device for imaging in clinical scenarios.