A faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Engineering & Applied Science has been awarded two separate grants worth a combined $2.5 million to develop better biomedical imaging tools.

Mark Anastasio, professor of biomedical engineering, will use a four-year, $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a new X-ray technique that will assist engineers as they develop new bioengineered tissues.

“We are developing a new imaging technology based on phase-contrast X-ray imaging,” Anastasio said. “It will serve as an enabling technology for tissue engineering studies.”

A typical X-ray image forms as radiation that is absorbed by tissues and bones, providing doctors with a look inside the body. Anastasio’s new technology doesn’t rely entirely on the absorption of X-ray energy, it also exploits wave optic effects, measuring the X-ray’s refractions for a much more precise peek inside.

“In some cases, you can make the X-ray beam act like a wave,” Anastasio said. “In such cases, when it hits an interface between two tissues, it can actually bend by a very small angle; it can refract. If you can measure the angle by which these rays refract, you can form a more detailed image based on that information. It will let you see things that would normally be invisible to conventional X-ray imaging.”