The University of California Davis is launching a center dedicated to researching and commercializing new imaging technologies that could transform the way surgeries are performed.
The National Institutes of Health awarded UC Davis a $6.3 million grant to form the National Center for Interventional Biophotonic Technologies, which will have a physical space at Aggie Square in Sacramento. It will be led by director Laura Marcu, professor of biomedical engineering at UC Davis, and deputy director Dr. Griff Harsh, professor and chair of neurological surgery at UC Davis Health.
The center will advance two optical imaging technologies developed at UC Davis and combine them with an artificial intelligence platform that will give surgeons real-time information during surgical procedures.
“Currently there is technology to image patients prior to an intervention,” Marcu said.
Equipment like MRI machines can give doctors a detailed image of the area to be operated on prior to the surgery. But surgeons don’t have any imaging technology like that after they start the surgery.
“When you get into the operating room, they need additional data or information about the tissue they’re operating on, and that is currently lacking, real-time information about the nature of the tissue,” Marcu said.
The optical imaging technologies use light to provide detailed information about the surgery site. Light waves bounce off different types of tissue in different ways. Researchers are developing a noninvasive, handheld device that measures these fluctuations and feeds them into the AI platform, which could process the data and return real-time information about blood flow, metabolism and tissue constituents — for example, helping to identify healthy tissue and unhealthy or cancerous tissue.
“The concept behind the center is to have a snowball effect in terms of the application of these technologies,” Marcu said.
The center’s research lab will be in the biomedical engineering department at the university’s campus in Davis. The space in Aggie Square will include laboratories, teaching space, learning centers and the organizational headquarters of the center’s training and educational programs.
“Aggie Square supports advancements of biomedical technologies and close collaborations among engineers, clinician-scientists and industry. These promote development of clinically useful tools and dissemination of these discoveries and tools through teaching, training and commercialization,” Harsh said, in a statement. “We believe that the NCIBT embodies the mission and vision of Aggie Square.”
