Event Date
Event Date
Fluorescence imaging is being widely explored for intraoperative surgical guidance of head and neck cancers, using exogenous and endogenous contrast. However poor tumor contrast due to non-specific probe accumulation of tnon-targetted as well as receptor targeted probes is a major drawback. Here we show using preclinical and clinical studies that fluorescence lifetime (FLT) imaging can significantly improve the sensitivity and specificity for tumor detection using both indocyanine green (ICG) epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) targeted near infrared probes. We also show that FLTs in tissue are highly correlated with receptor expression levels, thereby enabling quantification of receptor quantification in vivo. Ongoing efforts in our group towards the translation of FLT imaging for intraoperative image guidance during surgeries of head and neck lesions, including oral and skin cancer will also be discussed.
Presenter
Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School (United States)
Dr. Anand Kumar is a physicist and engineer with training in optical physics, spectroscopy, optical communications and biomedical imaging. Dr. Kumar is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and serves as the Director of the Mike Toth Head and Neck Cancer Research Center at Mass Eye and Ear. Dr. Kumar’s laboratory is focused on the development and translation of novel biomedical optical techniques for preclinical and clinical applications. His group has advanced several theoretical and experimental methods for whole-body fluorescence lifetime imaging and applied these methods for preclinical imaging of cancer metastasis, myocardial infarction, and Alzheimer’s disease.