Columbia University in the City of New York

Feb 12, 20192:00 pm
Seminar

Advancing Electromagnetics for Revolutionizing Biomedical Technology

Featuring Shaoying Huang, PhD, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)

February 12th, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall)

This talk will share how we advance electromagnetic (EM) solutions to revolutionize biomedical technology in the BioMedical-Electromagnetics Research Group led by Dr. Shaoying Huang in Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) in Singapore.  The biomedical technology focused in this talk is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Three MRI-EM-related projects will be presented. First comes the recent progress on the development of a low-field man-portable MRI head imager.  The advancements on magnet designs, image reconstructions, radiofrequency (RF) coil designs, and the integration of different components will be introduced. This is an exploration of fundamental technologies and their integration towards a feasible portable MRI solution. It may pave the way for flexible MRI scans, which may enable studies that are not supported by existing MRI scanners, such as those on the correlation of brain and body movements that are difficult to conduct in a conventional scanning setup. Besides RF engineering and image reconstruction, moving from low field to high field, the development of a fast algorithm for high-field MRI safety will be shared. This study will show how the advancement of computational EM shed light into solving safety problems in a high-field MRI system. Moreover, stepping away from proton density, MRI as a probe to measure electrical properties of human tissue in vivo through manipulating Maxwell’s equations, which is named MR electrical property tomography (MREPT), will be detailed. It will illustrate the key role of EM to widen the horizon of what MRI can visualize. Besides MRI-related projects, an MR-inspired university-industry collaborative project on non-contact in-circuit testing (ICT) will be briefed. Our research vision is to further advance the frontier of both EM and biomedicine-related physics. Specifically, for high field MRI, to realize safe scans; for low-field MRI, to realize a more flexible and relatively low-cost MRI scanner that allows routine scans, even in a daily manner, to capture the time course of aging and other neurological diseases with different tissue contrasts, such as electrical properties besides proton density.


About Shaoying Huang

Shaoying Huang received the BEng, MEng, and PhD degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2003, 2006, 2011, respectively. She joined the University of Hong Kong in 2010 working on computational electromagnetics (EM), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2012 working on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) related EM problems, both as a postdoctoral fellow. She joined Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) as an assistant professor in the pillar of Engineering Product Development since 2014. She is an adjunct assistant professor in the department of surgery in National University of Singapore, Singapore. Her research interests include portable and flexible MRI, RF aspects of MRI, MR electrical property tomography (MREPT), non-linear MRI image reconstruction, radiofrequency (RF)/microwave noninvasive/contactless sensing, wideband RF/microwave components, and wireless power transfer.

This seminar will be held in the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall) on Columbia's Manhattanville campus.

For more information, please contact Margarett Silva.

Venue: the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall)
3227 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Connect with us