MRTD Laboratory Team
In the clinical translation process, technology discovery is achieved through the collaboration between two separate yet equally important key teams: The biomedical engineers, who develop and validate new technologies, and the physicians, who evaluate these discovered medical techniques.
Keigo Kawaji, Ph.D. Principal Investigator at IIT
Dr. Kawaji, a Biomedical Engineer, holds the title of Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Magnetic Resonance Technology Discovery Lab, which was first founded at the University of Chicago’s Cardiac Imaging Center's MRI program in 2014. In January of 2018, the MRTD lab became part of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, with expanded research goals in achieving unique and important scientific work that requires both engineering and medicine expertise.
Current Members, Visiting Students, and Lab Alums
Graduate Students
Jacob (Jake) Goes, BS ('18 from Northern Illinois University) - BME Doctoral student; PhD program (IIT)
Jacob (Jake) is a BME PhD student who joined the MRTD lab in August of 2018. He received an EE BS with BME concentration from Northern Illinois University in May 2018. Jake's research interests lie in the technical development and evaluation of novel instrumentation to facilitate superior MRI techniques in the clinical hospital setting. In 2019, Jake was awarded the presitigious Pritzker Fellowship from IIT. He also serves on the NIU BME Advisory Board.
Vivian Nguyen, BA (‘17 from UChicago) - BME Doctoral student; PhD program (IIT)
Vivian is a BME PhD student who joined the MRTD lab in August of 2019. She has two years of Lab Technician experience prior to joining the doctoral program at IIT. She works on both clinical MRI protocol assessment (SENC, TAG CMR pulse sequences), and is developing a novel pricision-based MR-guided tissue charaterization pipeline.
Graduate Lab Alums
Alum ‘21: Fei Mo, BS (‘20) MS (‘21) in BME from IIT
Fei is a recent BME MS graduate from the MRTD lab who first joined in January of 2019 as an undergraduate researcher. She pursued her Masters research during the pandemic, completing her MS thesis in the quantitative MRI assessment of cardiac perfusion MRI reconstructions that leverage Deep Learning denoising methods in the clinical processing pipeline. She is an Imaging Specialist in the Department of Pathology at UIC (University of Illinois at Chicago).
ALUM '21: Emily Tao, MAS in CS-Math from IIT
Current Position: Data Engineer, Two Point Conversions
Emily earned her Masters in May 2021. She joined the MRTD lab in August of 2019 with two years of Lab Technician experience. She served as a data scientist at the Chicago Transit Authorities (CTA), and is currently a Data Engineer at Two Point Conversions.
ALUM '21: Mark Dhom, BS-MAS in BME-ECE from IIT
Current Position: Technical Solutions Engineer, Epic Systems
Mark earned his BME-ECE BS-MAS degree in May '21. He has been a member of the MRTD lab since January of 2019. He is an Applications Specialist at Epic Systems covering Radiology (Madison, WI).
ALUM '21: Kimberly Reglos, BS-MAS in BME-ECE from IIT
Current Position: 3D Printing Engineer, A&B Orthodontic Lab
Kimberly earned her BME-ECE BS-MAS degree in May '21. She joined the MRTD lab in August of 2020. She is a 3D Printing Engineer at A&B Orthodontics in Chicago IL.
ALUM '21: Kian Madani, BS-MAS in ECE/Physics-BME from IIT
Current Position: Patent Engineer, Cardinal Intellectual Property
Kian earned his ECE/Physics-BME BS-MAS degree in May 2021. He joined the MRTD lab in May 2020. He worked on a proposal for expanding IIT's connectivity to local institutions such as the Chicago Public Schools using an online digital curriculum pilot trial. He presented his proposal at the Change@illinoistech initiative. He is currently a Patent Engineer at Cardinal Intellectual Property (Urbana, IL).
ALUM '20: Blessing Obioma, MS in BME from IIT
Current Position: Corporate Food Safety Manager, Ferrera
Blessing earnder her MS degree in August 2020 with her thesis entitled: “Impact of Data Shape, Fidelity, and Inter-Observer Reproducibility of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Pipelines”. She completed two major studies studies - first in analysis of AI safeguards using Cardiac MR datasets, and second in inter-operator observability measurements. She is currently the Corporate Food Safety Manager at Ferrara (Chicago, IL).
ALUM '19: Nanyque Boyd BS-MAS in BME-ECE from IIT
Current Position: Field Service Engineer, Illumina
Nanyque is a co-terminal BME-ECE MAS ‘19 graduate. She joined the MRTD lab in March of 2018 through her graduation in May 2019. She completed ENGR 599 clinical immersion research on mathematically optimized methods of a highly specialized non-Cartesian MRI sampling acquisition approach for cardiac and neuro imaging applications. Upon graduation, she remained at IIT supporting ongoing projects, and is currently an engineer at Illumina.
ALUM '18: Neal Patel, BS-MAS in BME-ECE from IIT
Current Position: Clinical Project Manager, Epic System
Neal is a co-terminal BME-ECE MAS '18 graduate. He joined the MRTD lab in January of 2018, completing a BMES abstract through his Armour College of Engineering MIND fellowship (Project on ECV map motion error compensation via confidence maps), which was accepted for a poster presentation at the BMES 2018 Annual meeting. After graduating from IIT in 2018, he is currently a Clinical Project Manager at Epic System based in Madison, WI.
ALUM '17: Kohei Matsumoto, MA ('16) in Public Policy from UofC
Current Position: PhD Candidate (Business-Marketing) at UIC
Kohei was a member of MRTD group at the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) since September of 2015, while he pursued a MA degree in Public Policy (Grad 2016). He is currently a PhD student in Marketing at the University of Illinois - Chicago (UIC), and is studying the market proliferation of healthcare techs. Kohei continues to collaborate with MRTD for his analysis of large healthcare market datasets.
ALUM '15: Sui-Cheng Wang, MS in BME from Northwestern University
Current position: Lead Cardiac MRI Applications Engineer, Philips
Sui-Cheng completed a 9-month research rotation in MRTD (Sept 2014-May 2015), where she successfully defended her MS thesis on her work that was published in the premier technical MRI journal: Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (MRM). After graduating from the BME MS program at Northwestern University in 2015, she has worked as an Applications Engineer for the MRI team at Philips Healthcare in Best, The Netherlands.
Sarah Schroeder - BioE '20 at Washington State University. Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) '18. (Primary Advisor: Dr. Vaicik).
Sarah spent the summer of 2018 working in the tissue engineering lab, where her REU research role was to synthesize, measure, and quantitate the properties of plant-based tissue to simulate healthy (i.e. normal myocardium) and diseased (i.e. chronic heart failure) tissue of the heart. She has successfully submitted an abstract to the BMES conference in Oct. 2018.
Karolena (Lena) Lein - BME '20 at Arizona State University. Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) '18. (Primary Advisor: Dr. Cinar).
Karolena (Lena) spent the summer of 2018 working for Dr. Ali Cinar in the PMMC Lab, where her REU research project was to develop a healthy volunteer study that examined physiologic response changes to external visual stimuli. She has successfully submitted an abstract to the BMES conference in Oct. 2018.
Madison (Madi) Moucka - BME (4+1) '20 at Texas A&M University. Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) '18. (Primary Advisor: Dr. Papavasiliou).
Madison (Madi) spent the summer of 2018 working for Dr. Georgia Papavasiliou in The Polymeric Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering Lab, where her REU research role was to synthesize, measure, and characterize the properties of hydrogels with specific controlled released properties. She has successfully submitted an abstract to the BMES conference in Oct. 2018.
Yudai Suzuki, MS - ECE MS (2019) from Gifu University - Japan. Exchange Research Student.
Yudai hails from Gifu University Japan, where he is completing a MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, focusing on the application of Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based methods for image reconstruction in Dynamic cardiac MRI techniques. Primarily affiliated with the Hayamizu-Tamura Lab (asr-lab) in Japan, He is visiting IIT for the summer of 2018 between June and August.
Tsubasa Maeda, BS - ECE MS (2022) from Gifu University - Japan. Exchange Research Student.
Tsubasa from Gifu University Japan, where he is completing a MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, focusing on the application of Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based methods for image reconstruction in Dynamic cardiac MRI techniques. Primarily affiliated with the Hayamizu-Tamura Lab (asr-lab) in Japan, He is visiting IIT for the summer of 2018 between June and August.
Key Collaborations
IIT-Biomedical Engineering Investigators
MRTD's mission is to educate future biomedical engineers through unique research that advance both society and humanity. From the biomedical imaging perspective, this goal is achieved through strong intra-departmental collaboration with cell and tissue engineers who develop new biologically inspired materials and seek to validate novel approaches using MRI, and also with neuroscience/neuroimaging engineering experts who benefit from MRTD's unique techniques when applied to the brain.
MRTD's immediate goal is to lead an effort in developing an engineering research portfolio that addresses unique challenges such as heart motion, quantitative imaging of physiologic biomarkers, and novel biomedical instrumentation. Several unique student projects are immediately available to BME students at IIT.
UCMC-Cardiac Imaging Center (with Amit R. Patel through Dec 02201)
The Cardiac Imaging Center - or the globally well-established 'Echo Lab', has some notable firsts, including the pioneering efforts in developing the 3D echocardiography technology widely used around the world today.
The Center's Director, Dr. Roberto Lang - and his twitter account provides an overview of everything to know about the heart; including these illustrative models of heart conditions.
The CMR program in the Cardiac Imaging Center has a team of seven clinical faculties and 3-5 imaging fellows each year, and ongoing MRTD support across the two Chicago campuses to conduct advanced imaging protocols in both pre-clinical and clinical settings.
MRTD continues its strong collaboration with the Cardiac Imaging Center, which embeds biomedical engineers into the clinical hospital setting at UCMC. This provides physicians choice opportunities to explore and pursue new research with IIT's biomedical engineers.
UCMC-NeuroMRI group - (with Timothy J. Carroll Group)
Dr. Timothy Carroll, Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Medical Center, leads the Neurovascular MRI research group to detect and address diseases in the brain, including ischemic stroke. He is a key collaborator in the technical development and pre-clinical evaluation of several MRI techniques which MRTD had previously supported since 2015.
Key lab member collaborators in Carroll Lab: Charles (Grady) Cantrell, Ph.D.; Dallas Turley, Ph.D.; and Alexey Dimov, Ph.D.
UCMC-Cardiothoracic Surgery group
Dr. Takeyoshi Ota, MD Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Medical Center, leads several AHA and NIH-funded research projects with us as collaborators.
Dr. Narutoshi Hibino, MD Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Medical Center leads several NIH-funded research.
With both collaborating labs at UofC, we are able to conduct sophisticated tissue engineering and imaging experiments to assess heart failure disease with the collective team.
Northwestern Medicine Clinical Collaborator - Dr. Akhil Narang, MD (Cardiology)
Dr. Akhil Narang, MD. is a cardiologist with advanced imaging expertise at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago. A former Cardiology and Advanced Imaging fellow at the University of Chicago Medical Center (2015-18), Dr. Narang is an expert in multiple cardiac imaging modalities and approaches, including Cardiac MRI, Echocardiography, and CT. Since August 2018, he has been building his own program as an independent attending physician and investigator at the Feinberg School of Medicine at the Northwestern Downtown campus, he continues to collaborate with the MRTD laboratory in both research and student career development.
With a prior engineering degree in BioE, Dr. Narang is an MD physician who is also familiar in the fundamentals of working as an engineer in the clinical hospital setting. With Dr. Kawaji, the principal investigator of the MRTD lab, Dr. Narang hopes to advise BME students in the MRTD lab in key aspects of the clinical sciences, including how Biomedical Engineers serve a critical role in the Clinical Hospital Setting.
Gifu University, Japan (ECE) - Tamura-Hayamizu Lab (2015-21); Tamura Lab (2021 - present)
We have a very long collaboration with Gifu University. Since 2018, we have successfully realized 2x student exchanges to Chicago, and hope for more post-pandemic.