Changing the Image of Medicine
Dr. Hanli Liu works with optical imaging systems to improve brain tumor treatment.
UT Arlington engineers are at the forefront of biomedical imaging research that uses non-invasive procedures to combat cancer and other diseases.
Bioengineering Professor Hanli Liu, who has received the College of Engineering Excellence in Research Award, has developed optical imaging systems to monitor radiation's effects on brain tumors and therapeutic effects of anti-stroke drugs.
Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, and her collaborators include mathematicians from UT Arlington, life scientists from the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth and clinicians from UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
Dr. Liu, along with engineering faculty members Kambiz Alavi, George Alexandrakis, Khosrow Behbehani, Digant Davé and Karel Zuzak, collaborate with scientists from UT Southwestern and other area universities through the new Optical Medical Imaging Center in the Bill and Rita Clements Advanced Medical Imaging Building at UT Southwestern. The facility features 18 specially designed bays for clinical and research imaging devices as well as offices and laboratories for UT Arlington faculty, whose projects include:
- Developing a Hyperspectral Imager for surgical and clinical use (conducted in association with Texas Instruments).
- Using diffuse optical imaging for functional brain activities and for tumor diagnosis and prognosis under a variety of treatments.
- Conducting non-invasive medical imaging research and clinical tests using high-resolution imaging cameras to study small temperature and moisture changes in tissues (such as skin and breast) for cancer, diabetes, wound healing and lie detection.
- Using coherent optical tomography to locate targeted nanoparticles that have attached themselves to diseased organs.
- Using a two-photon microscope for photon counting and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy to study how breaks in DNA strands (caused, for example, by radiation to treat cancer) are being repaired by the body's cellular machinery.
