Biomedical Engineering Laboratory
The Riverside Research Frederic L. Lizzi Center for Biomedical Engineering in New York City has been undertaking biomedical research involving advanced ultrasound technology for 35 years. Evolving from the biomedical component of the Laboratories Division of Riverside Research, the Center has provided groundbreaking advances in the use of ultrasound for detection, diagnosis, evaluation, and monitoring of disease and for treating disease with high-intensity ultrasound. The Lizzi Center currently has added complementary optical technology to its ultrasound technology and thereby has dramatically broadened its range of capabilities.
The mission of the Lizzi Center is to develop advanced ultrasonic and optical techniques for:
- imaging tissue for diagnostic purposes;
- characterizing tissue in terms of material properties and for disease assessment; and
- treating disease in a non-invasive or minimally invasive manner.
The Lizzi Center can support a wide range of topics in biomedical engineering that involve ultrasound, optics, or hybrid methods:
- High-frequency, fine-resolution ultrasonic imaging
- Signal processing and coded excitation/reception
- Piezopolymer transducer technology
- High-intensity field evaluation
- Photo-acoustic (aka opto-acoustic) imaging
- Acousto-optical imaging
- Optical coherence tomography
- Diffuse optical tomography
- Tissue characterization and typing using quantitative ultrasound
- Ultrasound scattering-theory development and application
- Data-acquisition software and hardware
- Bioeffects and safety for ultrasound
- Therapy using high-intensity focused ultrasound
- Therapy using high-intensity light
- Statistical analyses
The Center has been at the forefront of biomedical-ultrasound research since the early 1970s. It has made significant and innovative theoretical and empirical contributions to the field for more than three decades. Recently, the Center has expanded its capabilities to include staff with expertise in biomedical-optics, which will open up exciting new areas of biomedical research at the Center. The Center’s staff, expertise, and capabilities are best-in-class and enable a multidisciplinary foundation for problem-solving:
- Senior Center staff are internationally recognized leaders in biomedical ultrasound and optics.
- In-house expertise includes physical acoustics, experimental design, biophysics, ultrasound-transducer technology, coherent optics, lasers, statistics, and project management.
- A diverse multidisciplinary staff provides capabilities across a broad spectrum of biomedical applications involving ultrasound, optics, and combinations of ultrasound and optics.
- The broad capabilities of the Center enable it to respond to priorities and needs defined by the government (e.g., NIH, NSF, USAMRMC, etc.), foundations, and industry.
The research laboratory of the Lizzi Center comprises over 1,200 square feet of research space that contains a wide variety of experimental equipment and fabrication tools. These laboratory facilities include fully automated, fine-resolution scanning devices for acquiring ultrasound echo-signal data, performing focused ultrasound therapy, or undertaking photo-acoustic experiments. These systems permit acoustic excitation with arbitrary waveforms or monocycle excitations and can digitize ultrasound echo signals on multiple channels. Experimental systems utilize ultrasound frequencies up to 250 MHz. The laboratory also contains clinical ultrasound machines with RF data–acquisition capabilities and a customized ultrasonic imaging/therapy platform.
Vibration-isolated optical benches support the ultrasonic, opto-acoustics, and related hybrid optical and acoustical imaging and tomographic experiments.
The laboratory routinely uses LabVIEW, MATLAB, SPSS, and modern CAD software tools for acquiring data, processing signals, generating images, classifying tissue types or states, statistically analyzing results, generating designs for experimental apparatus, fabricating experimental apparatus, etc.
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