I always felt that talking about research was boring, and I try to make it a point to avoid talking about my research in social settings. But the other day, my bible study explicitly asked me to finally explain my research to them. One person thought that the reason I never talked about what I worked on was because I thought that they wouldn’t understand it. In reality I felt like no one really wanted to hear a long-winded exposition about cardiovascular disease, ultrasound, and lasers.

So I realized maybe some people want to know. I figured I’d write a little blurb about what I do for those out there.

The rationale for my work is based on detecting/treating cardiovascular disease which is one of the leading causes of death in the US. Cardiovascular disease is usually caused by atherosclerosis, which is a narrowing of the vessel walls. Sometimes, the fatty plaques that build up in atherosclerosis can rupture and block blood flow causing a heart attack. One question we're trying to answer is, how can we detect the presence of these vulnerable plaques?

There's a relatively new laser-based imaging method called "photoacoustic imaging" which involves using a pulsed laser to irradiate tissue, which translates the laser energy into acoustic waves detectable by ultrasound transducers. Combined with traditional intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) which can show us the structure of the vessel, intravascular photoacoustic (IVPA) images can show the high optical absorbers in the vessel such as from collagen, or lipid build up, potentially revealing the presence of plaques. So essentially I fire lasers into blood vessels to detect the fat content in them ("pew pew pew"). You can see from the figure below that only the plaque content lights up in the IVPA image.

I've also been using this imaging technique in imaging metal objects such as stents. Cardiac stents are widely used today to treat atherosclerosis. But over time stents can degrade, drift, and are susceptible to atherosclerosis re-forming over the stent. So photoacoustic imaging can be used to monitor the integrity and position of the stent. Through image processing, a true 3d visualization of the stent and vessel can be reconstructed. So the picture below is an experiment I did to separately visualize the stent in the vessel apart from the structrual anatomy of the vessel itself.

So that's a quick run-down of what I work on. On any given day I can probably be found running experiments, writing about my experiments, or doing an number of odd-jobs around the lab.