Optics technology to bring new health care tools to light
The take-home message, though, was more direct. With more inter-disciplinary research, optics technology is growing and soon health care professionals will be able to benefit from new diagnostic and visualization tools that all rely on light.
Xingde Li, associate professor of both biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University, outlined research he is doing with collaborators that uses light in various ways to better see inside living patients.
Li’s lecture was the first in a series presented by the University of Texas at Arlington’s College of Engineering, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary with various events, including guest speakers throughout the school year. While most of the audience members were in some way affiliated with the college, either as researchers, professors or students, Li called for collaboration to tackle medical problems.
“In terms of disease and death, there is no good or bad,” Li said after the lecture. “It’s all bad.”
That’s part of the reason why optics specialists are focusing on two primary health issues, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Each of these is a delicate and potentially life-threatening condition, but accurately assessing what’s going on inside a patient’s body is difficult.
Modern imaging technology, like MRIs and CAT scans, rely on radiation and are time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, these technologies don’t have a very high resolution and can’t narrow in on tiny areas. Small clumps of cancer cells left behind after surgery can cause cancer to recur, and tiny blockages called plaques inside arteries can cause heart attacks and strokes.
Developing noninvasive probes, like ones that could be joined with an endoscope, that rely on light will be safer for a patient and can provide a better resolution so doctors can ensure they are being effective when it comes to biopsies and other procedures.
“Can a doctor tell what piece of tissue should be cut and what piece of tissue should be spared?” Li said.
There are various ways light can contribute to medicine. Not only can it provide structural imaging — giving a better resolution image of something happening just under the surface, for example — but it can also provide images of biochemical or molecular changes. Imaging can be achieved by translating echoes of light pulses, much like ultrasound, or it can done by using fluorescence.
Another benefit to optics technology is that it is much more compact than big imaging machines — it takes extensive planning to install and MRI machine in a building — and devices are being designed to be operated by physicians and other health care workers. Li said the devices he is working on are easy to use and that physicians are eager to try them out.
“Most of them are excited,” he said. “They are not afraid to turn the key on.”
Currently, the issue comes with overeager physicians sometimes jostling or accidentally breaking down the devices being made now, which are prototypes and vulnerable to problems, Li explained.
Light technologies are being used in medicine right now, Li said, such as the pulse oximeter, a small device that straps onto the finger and can tell a health worker how much oxygen is in a patient’s blood. However, the field is growing more as more applications are being found.
“People often don’t realize how much more optics can do,” he said.
Recent research growth comes in part from telecommunications advances, like fiber optics and different ways to create light, detect light and spread it, Li said. Translational researchers have been taking these new technologies and finding ways to advance them further or tweak their purposes, and public awareness of optics is growing as well.
However, just as all research, funding is necessary, Li said. Telecommunications technology came from corporate funding and research investments, and he said more backing will lead to better results. Some of his own research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Coulter Foundation Translational Research Award, among others.
“If we want to see some impact, there has to be commercialization, there has to be investment,” he said.
