Leading an Imaging Revolution
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Stephen Boppart - Bioimaging Science and Technology Group
As a medical doctor and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bioengineering, and Medicine at Illinois, Stephen Boppart works at the very heart of technology development for medical applications.
Boppart is director of the Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory at Beckman, where he has developed novel methods and technologies for biological imaging. An important part of his research has been the development of non-invasive or minimally invasive methods for generating high-resolution, real-time images of biological tissue at the cellular and molecular level for disease diagnosis at earlier stages and in greater detail than current methods.
A focus for Boppart is diagnosis of breast cancer through the use of an imaging technique called optical coherence tomography (OCT) that provides micron-scale images of subsurface biological tissue. In the OCT-based system Boppart's lab developed, a beam of near-infrared light is focused on the tissue and the resulting reflections are measured by their intensity and position to provide a high-resolution image in real time. While the possible applications of this technology are many, the potential of using the OCT system for what are called "optical biopsies" for breast cancer is a major thrust of Boppart's research and technology development efforts. Boppart is currently using the OCT system at Carle Hospital's Mills Breast Cancer Institute in Urbana.
In the video above, Boppart talks about the advantages the OCT-based system offers over other methods, the results of clinical trials and reactions to the system, as well as future goals for this exciting new technology.