Vasilis Ntziachristos, Ph.D.

A New Look into Tissue with Multispectral Optoacoustic Tomography : Progress and Entrepreneurship

Optical imaging is unequivocally the most versatile and widely used visualization modality in the life sciences. Yet it has been significantly limited by photon scattering, which complicates imaging beyond a few hundred microns. For the past few years, there has been an emergence of powerful new optical and optoacoustic imaging methods that can offer high resolution imaging beyond the penetration limits of microscopic methods. The talk discusses progress in multi-spectral opto-acoustic tomography (MSOT) that brings unprecedented optical imaging performance in visualizing anatomical, physiological and molecular imaging biomarkers. Some of the attractive features of the method is the ability to offer 10-100 microns resolution through several millimetres to centimetres of tissue and real-time imaging. We demonstrate implementations in the time and frequency domain, showcase how it is possible to accurately solve fluence and spectral coloring issues for yielding quantitative measurements of tissue oxygenation and hypoxia and demonstrate applications in resolving inflammation, metabolism, angiogenesis in label free mode. In parallel we summarize progress with clinical systems that offer to change readings of disease in-vivo and discuss complementarity with ultrasound imaging, fluorescence imaging and other modalities. Finally the talk offers insights into new miniaturized detection methods based on ultrasound detection using optical fibers, which could be used for minimally invasive applications.

Biography

NtziachristosVsmVasilis Ntziachristos Ph.D. is a Professor of Medicine and Electrical Engineering, the Director of the Chair for Biological Imaging (CBI) and of the Munich School of Bioengineering (MSB) at the Technical University of Munich and the director of the Institute for Biological and Medical Imaging (IBMI) at the Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen. He has received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, M.Sc and Ph.D. degrees in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia PA and has served as faculty at Harvard University and the Director of the Laboratory for Bio-optics and Molecular imaging at tge Massachusetts General Hospital. He has received his masters and doctorate degrees from the Bioengineering Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Diploma on Electrical Engineering from the. Professor Ntziachristos regularly serves as chair in international meetings and councils and in the editorial boards of several scientific journals and has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Gold Medal from the Society for Molecular Imaging (2015), the Gottfried Leibnitz prize (2013), the Erwin Schrödinger Award (2012) and was named one of the world’s top innovators by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review in 2004.