CIPS/OSA Brown Bag Seminar Series

Thursday, March 20, 2008

12 noon , RLE Haus Conference Room 36-428

"Clinical multimodal spectroscopy for detecting vulnerable atherosclerotic plaques"

Obrad Scepanovic

The combination of reflectance, fluorescence, and Raman spectroscopy - which we term multimodal spectroscopy (MMS) - can provide complementary and depth-sensitive information about tissue composition. We present an overview of the development of MMS into a clinical technique for detecting vulnerable atherosclerotic plaque, which is done through four main areas. In the first, we show that MMS can provide spectral markers indicative of the presence of morphological features of vulnerable plaque. Having established the motivation, the next step describes the mathematical tools used to extract quantitative spectral parameters and, moreover, to assess the uncertainty and confidence of the spectral information. In order to apply the mentioned methodology, in the third step we describe the development of a compact and practical clinical MMS instrument and an efficient, specialized MMS probe for data acquisition.
Lastly, we describe/ in vivo/ results from a clinical study of vulnerable plaque as an important step in clinical translation of the MMS technique.