Title: Seeing the Unseen in Patients: Advancing Disease Prevention and Treatment Through Microimaging

Speaker: Guillermo Tearney, Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School

Abstract: Today's gold standard for medical diagnosis is histology of excised biopsies or surgical specimens where tissue is removed from the body, processed, sectioned, stained, and looked at under a microscope by a pathologist. There are many limitations to this paradigm, including the facts that it is inherently invasive, time consuming, costly, and dangerous for some organs. Furthermore, oftentimes the diseased tissue is not readily seen by visual inspection. In these instances, the tissue is sampled at a random location, which can be highly inaccurate. If we could instead conduct microscopy inside the body, then we could overcome these limitations and provide real-time tools for screening, targeting biopsies, making diagnoses, and guiding intervention with cellular-level precision. This promise has motivated the development of a new field, termed in vivo microscopy, the goal of which is to obtain microscopic images from living human patients. Two in vivo microscopy technologies, confocal microscopy and optical coherence tomography, are currently available and in clinical use. Upcoming developments, such as whole organ microscopy, swallowable microscopy capsules, molecular imaging, and very high resolution microscopic imaging devices are in the pipeline and will likely transform how disease is diagnosed and medicine is practiced in the future.

Bio: Guillermo Tearney M.D., Ph.D. is Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Mike and Sue Hazard Family MGH Research Scholar, an Affiliated Faculty member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and heads his lab www.tearneylab.org at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Tearney received his MD magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School and received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Tearney’s research interests are focused on the development and clinical validation of non- invasive, high-resolution optical imaging methods for disease diagnosis. Dr. Tearney's lab was the first to perform human imaging in the coronary arteries and gastrointestinal tract in vivo with Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), which provides cross-sectional images of tissue architectural microstructure at a resolution of 10 μm. Recently, Dr. Tearney's lab has invented a next generation OCT technology, termed μOCT, which has a resolution of 1 μm and is capable of imaging cells and subcellular structures in the coronary wall. Dr. Tearney has also developed several other technologies, including a confocal endomicroscope capable of imaging the entire esophagus, an ultraminiature three-dimensional endoscope, a highly efficient form of near field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM), and novel fluorescence spectroscopy and multimodality imaging techniques. Dr. Tearney has written over 200 peer-reviewed publications, including papers that have been highlighted on the covers of Science, Nature Medicine, Circulation, Gastroenterology, and Journal of American College of Cardiology. Dr. Tearney’s work extends beyond his laboratory at MGH, many of his technologies are being produced commercially and he has founded the International Working Group on Intracoronary OCT Standardization and Validation, a group that is dedicated to establishing standards to ensure the widespread adoption of this imaging technology.

Host: Professor Hendon

Co-sponsored by EE Department and SPIE/OSA Student Chapter

Food will be served.