Research

Research Interest 1: biomedical instrumentation for real-time and sensitive tissue identification in the image-guided diagnosis/surgery

• Design and optimize a miniaturized medical device (only 0.93mm in diameter; fit various common endoscopes) for the prompt(<1s) intraoperative endoscopic tissue detection and imaging in the minimally invasive surgery, with 104 times better sensitivity than the reported camera systems

• Design a portable biomedical camera imaging system to simultaneously image in visible (VIS), near-infrared window I (NIR I, 650-950nm), and near-infrared window II (NIR II, 1000-1700nm) to facilitate the intraoperative imaging of biological tissues with deep penetration and sharp signal-to-background contrast.

• Design and optimize the probe to improve the sensitivity of the hand-held spectroscopic devices

• Conduct clinical trials, with my developed medical camera system and spectroscopic device, in Emory University Hospital, Emory Saint Joseph's Hospital and the University of Georgia Veterinary Teaching Hospital: In vivo and ex vivo inspection of human and canine spontaneous tumors to assist the real-time cancer diagnosis, including pancreatic cancers (the most deadly cancer, the only cancer that has 5-year survival rate less than 10%), breast cancers, etc.; demonstrate high sensitivity (94.8%) and specificity (95.0%) of diagnosis with my imaging and spectroscopic devices

Medical instrumentation for image-guided cancer surgery

A case of image-guided pancreatic cancer

Research Interest 2: design and fabricate biomedical engineering device - ion transport based environmentally friendly energy transducer

• Designed an ion transport based artificial biomedical engineering device, an “AC biobattery”, to harness the chemical energy to generate electricity in an environmentally friendly way as the electric eel cells do

• Incorporated various transmembrane proteins into the planar lipid bilayer and characterized their properties by electrophysiology

• Purified the transmembrane protein, α-hemolysin, by different chromatography techniques, including ion exchange and size exclusion chromatography.

• Designed the α-hemolysin mutant for the purpose of enhancing electrogenic performance of the energy transducer; mutated the wild type α-hemolysin by PCR mutagenesis and purified the mutants

• Detected current due to the unbalanced ion transport through the α-hemolysin mutant through the lipid bilayer and experimentally proved the electrogenic mechanism of the ion transport based energy transducer (a DC biobattery)

AC biobattery

• Mimic the electrogenic mechanism of electric eel

DC biobattery

Research Interest 3: modulation of photocurrent in iodine based composite materials

• The iodine molecule shows multiple optical transition levels in visible region. A molecule integrated with the iodine can be relatively simple for reconstruction of optical transition states. Therefore, it is a robust material for optical modification of the material systems and enhancement of opto-electric coupling.

• In this project, simple chemistry was used to prepare iodine based composites for study of photocurrent response when external modulation is applied.

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