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ME Faculty Candidate Seminar: Chengzhi Shi
April 24, 2023 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
ME Faculty Candidate Seminar:
“Ultrasound for thrombolysis and cellular imaging”
Chengzhi Shi
Assistant Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology
Monday, April 24, 2023, 11:00 am
2540 ME Grand Conference Room
GG Brown Building
Abstract:
As an important medical tool, ultrasound has been used for diagnostics and therapy for decades. Unlike X-ray based imaging, ultrasound does not rely on radiative activities that makes it much safer for medical applications. Comparing to optics, ultrasound has a much higher penetration depth into the tissue. These advantages make ultrasound the dominant imaging method for abdominal organ observation. The developments of ultrasound contrast agents like microbubbles and nanodroplets have enabled imaging beyond diffraction limit. Moreover, the studies of high intensity ultrasound have enabled many novel therapies including blood clot sonothrombolysis. However, the existing super-resolution ultrasound technique cannot be used for the observation of cells. For therapeutic ultrasound, sonothrombolysis usually lasts for more than 15 hours when treating a large clot, which is undesirable and can sometimes be life threatening for severe cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) or pulmonary embolism (PE). In this seminar, I will present our recent research on super-resolution ultrasound imaging with phase-transitioning nanodroplets and sonothrombolysis with vortex ultrasound induced shear stress. Our results on the imaging in gel phantoms have shown the achievable resolution at micrometer scale. The preliminary experiments of microinjection of nanodroplets into single cells show the potential for future observation of single cells deep in tissue. Our results on the vortex ultrasound sonothrombolysis demonstrate a significant improvement in the efficacy and rate of clot lysis that allows us to recanalize large acute, completely occluded clot in a short treatment period, which can be a lifesaving tool for severe CVST and PE patients.
Bio:
Dr. Chengzhi Shi is an Assistant Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also a program faculty of Bioengineering, the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bionengineering and Bioscience, and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Before joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Shi earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018 and his M.S. and B.S. degrees from the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute in 2013 and 2010. His research interests include physical acoustics, wave propagation, metamaterials, ultrasound imaging, and therapeutic ultrasound. He has published many highly cited papers in renowned journals including Science, PNAS, and Nature Communications. Dr. Shi has also won prestigious awards including the NSF CAREER and the ONR YIP awards.