(Co-hosting with MITP) "Seeing the unseen in patients: Advancing disease prevention and treatment through microimaging"

Today's gold standard for medical diagnosis is histology of excised biopsies or surgical specimens where tissue is taken out of the body, processed, sectioned, stained an looked at under a light microscope by a pathologist. There are many limitations of this technique, including the fact that it is inherently invasive, time consuming, costly, and dangerous for some organs. Furthermore, oftentimes the diseased tissue is not readily seen by visual inspection and as a result the tissue is sampled at a random location, which can be highly inaccurate. If we could instead conduct microscopy inside the body, then we could provide tools for screening, targeting biopsies, making primary disease diagnosis, and guiding intervention on the cellular basis. This promise of has motivated the development of a new field, termed in vivo microscopy, the goal of which is to obtain microscopic images from living human patients. Two in vivo microscopy technologies, confocal microscopy and optical coherence tomography, are currently available and in clinical use. Upcoming developments, including whole organ microscopy, swallowable microscopy capsules, molecular imaging, and very high resolution microscopic devices are in the pipeline and will likely revolutionize how disease is diagnosed and how medicine is practiced in the future.

Guillermo J. Tearney MD PhD FACC FCAP.  Dr. Tearney is Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, the Mike and Sue Hazard Family Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Research Scholar, and an engineer and a board-certified pathologist. Dr. Tearney was ranked #3 in Nature Biotechnology's top 20 translational researchers in 2013. Dr. Tearney runs a 40-person laboratory at MGH that is focused on developing new microscopic imaging modalities for visualizing cells inside the human body. His lab was the first to perform human imaging in the coronary arteries and gastrointestinal tract in vivo with a 10-µm-resolution microscopic technique termed Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). He has conducted many of the seminal studies validating OCT and is considered an expert on OCT image interpretation. Recently, the Tearney Lab has invented a next-generation OCT technology, termed μOCT, which has a resolution of 1 μm and is capable of imaging cells and sub cellular structures in human tissues. Dr. Tearney has also developed several other technologies, including a confocal endomicroscope capable of imaging entire organs, the world's smallest endoscope, a highly efficient form of optical microscopy that obtains images at the nanoscale, and novel spectroscopy and multimodality imaging techniques. Dr. Tearney has also pioneered capsule endomicroscopy, which involves swallowing miniature microscopes in the shape of a pill; once swallowed these devices transmit microscopic images outside the body as they travel through luminal organs.

Dr. Tearney is co-editor of The Handbook of Optical Coherence Tomography and has written over 200 peer-reviewed publications, including papers that have been highlighted on the covers of Science, Nature Medicine, Circulation, Gastroenterology, and Journal of American College of Cardiology. Dr. Tearney has over 400 patent applications (~100 granted) and licenses on more than 200 patents/applications resulting in commercial medical devices.

Dr. Tearney's work extends beyond his laboratory at MGH: He is the co-chair of the Research Advisory Board for the Institute for Aging Research, vice-chair of the Collage of American Pathologists Work Group on In Vivo Microscopy, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, and he has founded the International Working Group on Intravascular OCT Standardization and Validation, a group that is dedicated to establishing standards to ensure the widespread adoption of this imaging technology.