Our May 26, 2022 webinar featured Charles F. Caskey, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Radiology from Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science presenting:
"Dissecting the Brain with Sound and Magnets"
About the Professor
Charles F. Caskey, Ph.D. studies diagnostic and therapeutic uses of ultrasound. He is especially interested in image-guided therapy applications where therapeutic ultrasound is guided by ultrasonic imaging or combined with another imaging modality, such as MRI. His lab focuses on diagnostic and therapeutic applications of ultrasound with emphasis on image-guided therapy and drug delivery. Toward this goal, they use micron-sized encapsulated bubbles (microbubbles) to target diseased vasculature and develop algorithms to specifically image these bubbles with ultrasound. Under the right ultrasound conditions, these microbubble contrast agents can also locally enhance vascular permeability, allowing them to act as therapeutic agents as well. Ultrasound can also be used to noninvasively apply heat for focal ablation or activation of temperature-sensitive drugs, and they have an ongoing project where they are performing ultrasonic heating under MR-guidance.
This session will be moderated by Elly Martin from University College London.
Elly Martin is a senior research fellow in the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at University College London, UK, where she is a principal investigator in the Biomedical Ultrasound Group, and is also with the Wellcome EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences at UCL. She received an MSci in physics with astrophysics from the University of Bristol and an MSc and PhD in medical physics from the University of Exeter. She joined the Medical Ultrasonics section of the Acoustics group at the National Physical Laboratory, UK in 2011, before joining UCL in 2014. Her research focuses on development of therapeutic uses of ultrasound for different applications including treatment of cancer and neurological conditions, as well as investigating new uses of ultrasound. This involves measurement and simulation of ultrasound fields, development and characterisation of ultrasound devices, and measurement of the acoustic properties of materials.