Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School

Non-invasive Biophotonics for Personalized Medicine

Abstract
Personalized or precision medicine is an emerging paradigm in health care delivery that seeks to tailor medical treatment to the individual characteristics, needs and preferences of each patient. Biophotonic technologies are likely to play a significant role in realizing the benefits of personalized medicine by leveraging novel contrast mechanisms to offer timely feedback on treatment progress, and can be integrated into compact, cost-effective devices that are suitable for longitudinal patient monitoring.
Our work has been focused on the technology development and clinical translation of optical imaging and sensing using near-infrared light. This talk will report on our efforts in two major application areas: in the context of breast cancer management, we are combining dynamic diffuse optical tomography with x-ray digital breast tomosynthesis to improve breast cancer diagnosis and neoadjuvant chemotherapy monitoring outcomes; in the context of neuromonitoring, we are advancing methods for the accurate quantification of brain health in the presence of systemic physiology interference in adults, by using a combination of near-infrared spectroscopy and diffuse correlation spectroscopy techniques together with advanced light transport models, with the goal to offer new tools for improving the management of brain perfusion in patients undergoing cardiovascular interventions.

Biography
Dr. Stefan Carp is an Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and a member of Massachusetts General Hospital Martinos Center Optics Division. He received his BS degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering from MIT and pursued his doctorate at U.C. Irvine (UCI) under the supervision of Dr. Vasan Venugopalan. At UCI he discovered the field of biomedical optics and developed a non-contact optoacoustic imaging system for his dissertation project. After graduation, he worked on optical breast imaging after moving to the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he now leads a research group that focuses on the development of novel techniques for tissue hemodynamics and oxygen metabolism monitoring to help advance personalized medicine.

For more information or to schedule a meeting with the speaker, please contact Hanna Kim.