Center Overview
Successful medical interventions require precision, timely information, and effective clinical decision-making. Whether identifying tumor margins, assessing tissue perfusion, monitoring cerebral hemodynamics, or guiding cardiovascular and other image-guided interventions, clinicians need information about tissue composition, metabolism, physiology, and perfusion that is immediately actionable, integrated into clinical workflows, and interpreted in the context of patient-specific imaging and clinical information.
The National Center for Interventional Biophotonic Technologies (NCIBT) addresses this unmet need by:
- Advancing scalable and readily deployable optical technologies that provide quantitative biochemical, molecular, and physiological information at the point of intervention;
- Developing an AI-enabled intraprocedural platform that integrates multimodal imaging, procedural data, and patient-specific information to provide real-time visualization, analysis, and decision support; and
- Translating and disseminating these technologies through collaborative and service projects, training, and partnerships with investigators and medical centers across the nation.
Strategy
NCIBT advances two complementary optical technologies—Interventional Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging (iFLIM) and Interferometric Diffuse Optical Spectroscopy (iDOS)—together with an AI-enabled analytics and visualization platform, from technological innovation toward broad biomedical and clinical use. Our open and scalable framework is designed to incorporate additional optical and non-optical imaging technologies, expanding the information available for intraprocedural decision-making.
Our strategy is to:
- Advance iFLIM, iDOS, and AI-enabled analytics in parallel, leveraging their technological and clinical synergies;
- Harness artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics to accelerate technology development and transform complex multimodal data into actionable information;
- Integrate biophotonics, engineering, computation, and clinical expertise throughout technology development, validation, and translation;
- Catalyze new biomedical and clinical applications through a nationally distributed network of Collaborative and Service Projects; and
- Accelerate dissemination and adoption through training, education, partnerships, and broad access to NCIBT technologies and resources.