Qifa Zhou, Ph.D.

The sticky, wearable sensor could help identify early signs of acute liver failure.

MIT engineers have developed a small ultrasound sticker that can monitor the stiffness of organs deep inside the body. The sticker, about the size of a postage stamp, can be worn on the skin and is designed to pick up on signs of disease, such as liver and kidney failure and the progression of solid tumors.

In an open-access study appearing today in Science Advances, the team reports that the sensor can send sound waves through the skin and into the body, where the waves reflect off internal organs and back out to the sticker. The pattern of the reflected waves can be read as a signature of organ rigidity, which the sticker can measure and track… Continue reading.

Retinal degenerative diseases that are caused by progressive degeneration of the light-sensitive photoreceptors in the retina reman among the major causes of vision loss and blindness, affecting tens of millions of people worldwide.

Although the rods and cones which are the light-sensitive cells of the retina have completely degenerated, the neural circuitries connected to the brain are mostly well preserved providing the opportunity to restore vision by directly stimulating the retinal neurons… Continue reading.

Biomedical Engineering Professor Dr. Qifa Zhou has been elected by the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) as a Fellow of the Society.  Dr. Zhou is one of about 70 new Fellows elected worldwide in 2013. Dr. Zhou is being recognized for his achievements in integrating ultrasound with OCT and developing photoacoustic bio-imaging system for cell and tissue imaging application.

Scientists from USC and Washington University in St. Louis have developed a new type of medical imaging that gives doctors a fresh look at live internal organs.

The technology combines two existing forms of medical imaging — photoacoustic and ultrasound — and uses them to generate a high-contrast, high-resolution combined image that could help doctors spot tumors more quickly.

“Photoacoustic endoscopy provides deeper penetration than optical endoscopy and more functional contrast than ultrasonic endoscopy,” said Lihong Wang, principal investigator and corresponding author of a study on the technology that appeared in Nature Medicine on July 15, and professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University.

Wang collaborated with Qifa Zhou, Ruimin Chen and Kirk Shung of USC, as well as Joon-Mo Yang, Christopher Favazza, Junjie Yao, Xin Cai and Konstantin Maslov from Washington University.

“This is the first time that we have had small endoscopy with two imaging modalities,” said Qifa Zhou, one of the principal investigators and corresponding authors of the study, and professor at the NIH Resource Center for Medical Ultrasonic Transducer Technology in the USC Department of Biomedical Engineering.