Dr. Thomas O'Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to that he was the Director of the Diffuse Optical Spectroscopy and Imaging Laboratory at the Beckman Laser Institute at the University of California, Irvine and a U.S. Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program Postdoctoral Fellow. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2005 and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007 and 2011, respectively. Dr. O'Sullivan is engaged in translational biomedical research based upon the development and application of deep tissue optical imaging and sensing. In particular, Dr. O'Sullivan’s lab is advancing diffuse optical spectroscopy and imaging (DOSI), which allows for contrast-free quantitative measurements of tissue architecture and metabolic function. This work, while relevant to many diseases, is presently focused on applications in breast cancer including risk assessment, screening, differential diagnosis, and predicting individual response to chemotherapy treatment. Dr. O'Sullivan has co-founded one company in this area (NearWave Corp.) and holds several patents on DOSI-related technologies. In addition to his research, Dr. O’Sullivan is passionate about community outreach, has served the optics and photonics community as a senior member of OSA and SPIE, and is currently an associate editor for Biomedical Optics Express.
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Diffuse optical spectroscopy (DOS) is a noninvasive sensing technique that is sensitive to near-infrared absorption and scattering and capable of probing centimeter-deep volumes of tissue in vivo. DOS is relatively low-cost, does not require specialized training and thus potentially suitable for use in low-resource settings. In this work, we assess the potential of DOS to detect and quantify the presence of hemozoin noninvasively and at physiologically relevant levels. We suspended synthetic hemozoin in Intralipid-based tissue-simulating phantoms in order to mimic malaria infection in multiply-scattering tissue. Using a fiber probe that combines frequency-domain and continuous-wave broadband DOS (650-1000 nm), we detected hemozoin concentrations below 250 ng/ml, which corresponds to parasitemia sensitivities comparable to modern rapid diagnostic tests. We used the experimental variability to simulate and estimate the sensitivity of DOS to hemozoin in tissue that includes hemoglobin, water, and lipid under various tissue oxygen saturation levels. The results indicate that with increased precision, it may be possible to detect Hz noninvasively with DOS.
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