FROM BENCH TO BEDSIDE THROUGH COLLABORATION
We will solve specific problems pertaining to tissue ischemia and infarction by applying systematic Engineering principles specifically in the clinical hospital setting. We have established an effective inter-institutional research collaboration to solve specific needs of clinicians using biomedical engineering. The goal is be to embed Biomedical Engineers in the clinical setting, and systematically following these three steps:
1) IDEATION AND PROTOTYPING of the MR-based biomarker technology development and systems engineering will both be investigated in a controlled, systematic, engineering laboratory setting at IIT. The IIT BME Lab will be equipped with state-of-the-art software development environment, simulation hardware and software, and research space with instrumentation capabilities to effectively facilitate new ideas into prototype clinical approaches that can be evaluated in the pre-clinical experiment setting.
2) ON-THE-SCANNER VALIDATION for the above will employ a set of carefully controlled experiments using reference gold standard approaches for each comparison. Particularly for novel quantitative biomarkers, we will conduct experiments in dedicated tissue engineering models. My BME lab personnel will therefore be embedded in the clinical hospital setting, and collaborate with surgical, interventional, and imaging MD clinicians who are critical personnel for this study.
3) CLINICAL TRANSLATION of the proposed techniques will evaluate the developed methods in the clinical patient imaging setting. The goal is to establish select MR-based biomarker approaches from our BME Laboratory to the clinical hospital bedside with key MD and scientific industry collaborators.