Emerging Ultrasound Technologies for Biomedical Engineering by Dr. Kamyar Firouzi

ABSTRACT: Ultrasound (high-frequency sound wave) has applications in a diverse array of fields, such as medicine, sensing, non-destructive testing, microscopy, fabrication, materials engineering, and electronics, among many others. Ultrasound is especially important to healthcare, not only as a commonly known diagnostic tool, but also as an emerging and revolutionary therapeutic modality with a tremendous safety level. Noninvasive focused ultrasound surgery is rapidly growing and becoming prominent nowadays, making its way to becoming the standard care. I will present our research on emerging ultrasound technologies, including ultrasonic devices and systems as well as algorithms and modeling tools.

In the first part of the talk, I will focus on trans-cranial focused ultrasound (tcFUS) for treating brain diseases such as tumors and neurological disorders. tcFUS utilizes ultrasound waves to noninvasively transmit energy through the skull. I will introduce the state-of-the-art technology, advantages as well as limitations, and present our research on improving the limitations. I will also present ultrasound neuro-modulation, an emerging technique with superior spatial specificity and penetration depth compared to existing modalities, and our efforts in understanding the underlying biophysical mechanisms. In the second part, I will present novel applications of machine-learning to various ultrasound inverse problems such as sensing, treatment, and estimation. Topics include localization and estimation in reverberant fields and chaotic cavities, in applications such as ultrasonic touchscreen and ultrasonic flow-metering. I will also discuss the promise of machine learning for treatment planning for noninvasive ultrasound surgery, ultrasound imaging, and in-situ characterization of hard tissue.

BIOSKETCH: Kamyar Firouzi is a Research Scientist at Stanford University, with an MS degree in mechanical engineering from University College London (UCL), London, U.K., and a PhD degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA. For his doctoral dissertation, he focused on localization of objects in chaotic and reverberant enclosures, based on which he developed a Lamb-wave multitouch ultrasonic touchscreen. For his Master’s dissertation, he developed a predictive computational tool for evaluation of photoacoustic imaging techniques for detection of brain tumors. He has several years of research experience in numerous ultrasound subjects, including modeling and design of ultrasonic transducers, physical acoustics, numerical methods, inverse problems (in particular, localization and imaging), signal processing, and machine learning. His current research lies at the forefront of novel biomedical ultrasonic devices, in particular for trans-cranial focused ultrasound therapy as well as ultrasound neuromodulation, and emerging machine learning and computational models for ultrasonic sensing, treatment, estimation, and imaging. He has been a recipient of the Young Investigator Awards from two well-recognized prominent ultrasound scientific organizations, the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in 2017 and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation in 2018.

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Mar 06, 2019
10:00 am - 11:00 am

Location:
38-138 Engineering IV
420 Westwood Plaza Los Angeles CA 90095