Emad Boctor of Johns Hopkins University

Abstract:

Due to its low cost and clinical safety, ultrasound (US) imaging remains one of the most commonly used imaging modalities in medical practice. Unfortunately, there are three major challenges limiting not only the safe practice of this modality, but also broader patient deployment and quantitative clinical outcomes. First, a very significant fraction of ultrasonographers (63-91%) develop musculoskeletal disorders due to efforts required to perform imaging tasks, which are further amplified when imaging obese patients given the need for higher forces to compress anterior fat layers and for efficient procedure completion. Second, ultrasound imaging is limited by loss of resolution at increasing depths (as in imaging obese patients), significantly limiting the imaging value with conventional ultrasound imaging. Finally, while ultrasound imaging is most commonly qualitative in nature, quantitative imaging (e.g. speed of sound) has been limited to full-tomographic imaging of the breast; thus, there is a significant gap and need for more accurate imaging of various organs and diseases. Interestingly, all these seemingly distinct challenges can be tackled and addressed via a co-robotic framework.

In the first part of the talk, we will introduce our co-robotic ultrasound imaging platform with cooperative force control, our high-resolution co-robotic synthetic tracked aperture imaging, and our recent developments in co-robotic quantitative ultrasound tomography.  

In the second part of the talk, we will demonstrate our research in advanced ultrasound imaging. Specifically, we will focus on our efforts to democratize photoacoustic and thermal imaging technologies to be deployed on available ultrasound platforms and with minimal hardware alterations. Towards this goal, we will present our thermal imaging approach enabled by ultrasound tagging technology. Finally, we will demonstrate the first transcranial real-time in vivo recording of electrophysiological neural activity in the brain with near-infrared photoacoustic voltage-sensitive dye imaging.

Biography:

About the speaker:

Emad Boctor completed his B.Sc./M.Sc. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, in 1998. He also earned an MSCS degree in Engineering Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Louisville, Kentucky, in 2000. He received Master’s and Doctoral degrees in 2004 and 2007 from the Computer Science Department of Johns Hopkins University. In 2007, he joined The Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, where he initiated a research program in the field of advanced interventional ultrasound imaging. Dr. Boctor’s research focuses on image-guided therapy and surgery, a subject in which he has authored and co-authored over 85 peer-reviewed manuscripts, has filed more than 35 pending and issued patents, and has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships.

Dr. Boctor is an Engineering Research Center investigator and holds a primary appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology and a secondary appointment in both the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at Johns Hopkins. He is an active member of IEEE, SPIE, and the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) societies and has been a scientific reviewer for many prestigious journals and conferences.