UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

Amy Oldenburg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“How the Physics of Nanoparticle Motion in Biological Tissue Can Tell Us Useful Things: A Tale of Ultrasound and Optical Contrast Methods”

There are many parallels between ultrasonic imaging (US) and optical coherence tomography (OCT). They both produce images of biological tissue by detection of back-reflected waves, and they both are widely employed biomedical imaging modalities. However, US and OCT images often lack specific contrast to tissue properties of interest. In this talk I will describe two emerging US and OCT contrast methods: (1) magnetomotive imaging, in which magnetic nanoparticles are employed to label tissues of interest, and subsequently detected by their motion driven by electromagnets coupled with the imaging hardware, and (2) diffusion-sensitive imaging, in which gold nanorods act as sentinels of their biopolymeric environment by merit of their weakly-constrained Brownian motion. These methods are enabling new applications in a number of Useful Things, such as detecting blood clots, studying tumor growth, monitoring mucus hydration, and imaging tissue viscoelastic properties.