Shining a light – literally – on new diagnostic pathways
Speaker: Ishan Barman, Ph.D., MIT
Series: Other Events
Location:
J223 Equad
Date/Time: Thursday, February 21, 2013, 12:30 p.m.
- 1:30 p.m.
Abstract:
Integration of optical spectroscopy, analytical chemistry and pattern recognition methods is driving the development of biophotonic systems that have the capacity to elucidate latent information of a diverse array of pathophysiological conditions. This talk will highlight the application of biophotonics in two important clinical domains, namely diabetes monitoring and breast cancer diagnosis. First, I will outline the bench to bedside translation of a fully non-invasive blood glucose sensing approach and the challenges on the path to clinical realization. In particular, our efforts towards a spectroscopic solution of the well-known problem of physiological lag between the reference blood glucose values and the measured interstitial fluid glucose levels will be described. As an alternate route to diabetes monitoring, we will also demonstrate ultra-sensitive, label-free detection of long-term glycemic markers such as glycated hemoglobin, based principally on the “coffee ring” effect of analyte pre-concentration. The second half of the talk will focus on our pursuance of a combination of optical modalities for the real time characterization of breast cancer lesions at the patient bedside. Given the inability of existing techniques to accurately diagnose benign and malignant lesions in real-time, we have proposed a spectroscopy-based guidance mechanism for needle biopsy procedures. I will present the results of the first spectroscopic algorithms that are observed to substantially increase the diagnostic value of the biopsy, without relying on the action of exogenous contrast agents. The clinical translation of such integrative photonics approaches will offer new diagnostic pathways, due to their ability to provide high-throughput and high-content information in real-time and with minimal system perturbation.
Biography:
Ishan Barman, Ph.D., is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Laser Biomedical Research Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his B.Tech. (2005) from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur and subsequently his S.M. (2007) and Ph.D. (2011) degrees from MIT in Mechanical Engineering, working on the development of spectroscopic approaches for non-invasive blood glucose detection. He is currently pursuing his research on the conceptualization and application of photonic methods for real-time diagnosis of breast cancer and clinical translation of the same for guidance of breast biopsy procedures. His work has been extensively published in prestigious journals such as Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Cancer Research, PLOS ONE and Analytical Chemistry and has also been prominently featured in several leading scientific (Technology Review, Physics Today, Physics World, C&E News) and popular media (Wall St. Journal, CNN Newsroom with Ali Velshi) outlets. He has received several awards for his research contributions, notably the Tomas Hirschfeld Award by the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies and the Gordon Kirkbright Award by the Association of British Spectroscopists.
