Title: The Future of Photoacoustic Imaging
Speaker: Dr. Lihong Wang
Time: June. 29. 2008.7:00 P.M.
Venue: Room A301 At WNLO
Commercially available high-resolution 3D optical imaging modalities—including confocal microscopy, two-photon microscopy and optical coherence tomography—have fundamentally impacted biomedicine. Unfortunately, such tools cannot penetrate biological tissue deeper than the optical transport mean free path (about 1 mm in the skin). Photoacoustic tomography, which combines strong optical contrast and high ultrasonic resolution in a single modality, has broken through this fundamental depth limitation. In this presentation, the future of photoacoustic tomography is envisaged after the state of the art is reviewed.
Dr. Lihong Wang studied for the Ph.D. degree at Rice University, Houston, Texas under the tutelage of Drs. Robert Curl, Richard Smalley and Frank Tittel. He currently holds the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professorship in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He has authored and co-authored two books and published 120 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as Nature Biotechnology, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review, Optics Letters, and IEEE Transactions. He has delivered 130 plenary, keynote, and invited talks. He received the NIH FIRST award, NSF CAREER award, and Outstanding Young Scientist Award sponsored by Johnson & Johnson Medical, Inc. and the Houston Society for Engineering in Medicine and Biology. He is chair of the International Biomedical Optics Society. He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Optical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. He serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Biomedical Optics and Applied Optics. He has reviewed for more than 30 scientific journals. He has frequently organized conferences as a conference chair and received conference grants from the Whitaker Foundation and NIH. He has served as a study section chair or grant reviewer for NIH, NSF, and the Whitaker Foundation. He serves on the scientific advisory boards of three companies. His research on non-ionizing biophotonic imaging has been funded by NIH (principal investigator for nine NIH grants), NSF, DOD, the Whitaker Foundation, NIST, and other funding sources. His group has made seminal contributions to ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, photoacoustic tomography, thermoacoustic tomography, modeling of light transport in biological tissue, and polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography. In particular, his laboratory invented frequency-swept ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, dark-field confocal photoacoustic microscopy, exact reconstruction algorithms for thermoacoustic tomography, Mueller-matrix optical coherence tomography, and spectroscopic oblique-incidence reflectometry. His Monte Carlo model of photon transport in scattering media has been used worldwide.
