FIP Seminar: Designing medical devices with computational biophotonics

Presenter: Dr. Nicholas Durr, Associate Professor, Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Ophthalmology, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University

Computational biophotonics pairs optical system design with the development of intelligent algorithms to extract meaningful data from interrogated tissues (often via an unintuitive computational image). With the recent advances in deep learning, there are many exciting opportunities to jointly design data-driven models with novel optical imaging systems to create impactful medical devices. I will present our research in developing and translating computational biophotonics technologies for a variety of important healthcare needs, including: (1) enabling a non-invasive complete blood count with oblique back-illumination capillaroscopy, (2) preventing colorectal cancer with a computational colonoscope, (3) enabling through-catheter infection screening with lens free holographic microscopy, and (4) increasing access to eye care in low-resource settings with a low-cost, handheld wavefront aberrometer.

Nicholas Durr is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Ophthalmology. He directs the Computational Biophotonics Lab and teaches the capstone undergraduate medical device design program.  He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2003 and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from UT Austin in 2010. He was an M+Visión Fellow at MIT from 2011 to 2014. In 2013 he co-founded PlenOptika, which he led as CEO until he joined Hopkins in 2016.