Fractal organization of tissue: quantifying tissue scattering properties at the nanoscale

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

12:00 pm | Hudson 125

Presenter

Dr. Jeremy D. Rogers , Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Optical interactions with biological tissue provide powerful tools for study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. Optical scattering in tissue is one important interaction that is often considered a problem that limits imaging depth and degrades image quality. However, scattering can also be used to assess structural alterations in tissue. For example, tissue may be modeled as a continuous random medium and mass fractal. A fractal dimension can be quantified from scattering measurements such as enhanced backscattering spectroscopy and provides an exciting prospect for use as a marker for disease including assessment of cancer risk through field carcinogenesis.

Dr. Jeremy Rogers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Retina Research Foundation Edwin and Dorothy Gamewell Professor. He earned a PhD in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona where he worked on the engineering and development of a miniature microscope for endomicroscopy and included the use of MEMS, micro-optics, and grayscale lithography as well as testing and metrology for imaging instrumentation. His postdoctoral research at Northwestern University included the and design of the first Low-coherence Enhanced Backscattering Spectroscopy (LEBS) fiber optic probe for cancer screening. He has also developed fractal models of light scattering in tissue and extended Monte Carlo ray tracing to simulate enhanced backscattering in tissue. His research interests are to develop instrumentation and methodology to enable better non-invasive screening, diagnosis, and basic study of biological tissue.