Prof. Caigang Zhu, Biomedical Engineering

Investigation of optical fiber-probe geometry design for depth-sensitive optical spectroscopy measurement on subcutaneous tumors

Project Description:

Optical spectroscopy technique has been explored extensively for biomedical applications including tumor investigation. Because it has the great potential to provide dynamic, quantitative and simultaneous measurements of both metabolism and the associated vascular endpoints of solid tumors under a variety of conditions in vivo, optical spectroscopy technique may potentially serve as an important tool for translational cancer studies. In most commonly used spectroscopy platforms, a fiber-probe consisting multiple fibers is used for illumination and detection from which averaged optical measurement on tissue sample can be achieved. The volume average measurement may work fine if the primary interest is the central tumor mass and the tumor to non-tumor tissue ratio is high. However, such averaged measurement with a simple fiber probe geometry may induce significant errors if one wants to look at both tumor metabolism and the surrounding vascular microenvironment, especially in longitudinal studies where the tumor size varies with time. In this project, we will use Monte Carlo modeling to identify the optimal fiber-probe geometries of a spectroscopy platform to enable depth-resolved optical measurement on murine subcutaneous tumors with different size from which both vascular and metabolic parameters can be accurately quantified.

Collaborators (non-UK)

None at this point.

Students

Carrico, Evan P. (Undergraduate student researcher)

Md Zahid Hasan, Added on LCC cluster, 03/22/2023

Madison O Korfhage, Added on LCC cluster, 03/22/2023

Pranto Soumik Saha, Graduate, Added on LCC cluster, 06/26/2023

Software

For all projects an MCML simulator is utilized. The simulator is developed in C.

The details about this simulator can be found at https://omlc.org/software/mc/

Grants

Publications:

Numerical investigation of depth-sensitive diffuse reflectance and fluorescence measurements on murine subcutaneous tissue with growing solid tumors

Evan Carrico, Tengfei Sun, and Caigang Zhu. Biomedical Optics Express, Vol. 11, Issue 11, pp. 6311-6323 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.405321

Patents

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