COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Dr. Alvin T. Yeh, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has received a 2005 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for his research on live tissue characterization using optical microscopy.

The $400,000 grant will continue through 2010.

The prestigious NSF CAREER awards go to new faculty members for their career-development and teaching activities, highlighting them as upcoming academic leaders in the 21st century.

Yeh's research focuses on using a technique called non-linear optical microscopy (NLOM) to examine living tissue. Doctors typically use a procedure called a biopsy to examine tissue such as a tumor taken from a patient. Once the tissue sample is removed, the sample must be fixed with chemical reagents; dehydrated; embedded with wax, cut into super-thin slices; stained; and then mounted on a slide for viewing under a microscope.

But with Yeh's technique, doctors won't have to cut out the tissue or go through the arduous process of preparing the tissue for examination. The technique works by focusing a laser on a particular spot, and scanning the spot in two dimensions to create a 2D image. For thicker tissues, Yeh said scanning a section and then changing the laser's depth of focus incrementally followed by stacking the resulting 2D images will give a 3D image of the area under examination.

"We can image in situ, as the tissue is," Yeh said.

Yeh's CAREER Award will be used to support his research, including developing better instrumentation for NLOM. The typical setup, Yeh said, is a laser coupled with a microscope so that all specimens have to fit on the microscope stage. Yeh is working on a fiber-optic-based system so that the microscope-laser combo can be manipulated relative to the tissue sample.

In other areas of his work, Yeh is studying the microscopic basis of tissue properties, such as the cornea, and a process called tissue optical clearing, a technique that would enhance laser therapeutics (such as tattoo removal and skin resurfacing) by temporarily making skin more transparent. In a fourth area, Yeh and Dr. Jay Humphrey are studying how tissue responds to its mechanical environment and measuring the tissue's biological response to changes in its surroundings.

Yeh will also use his CAREER Award to establish an "exchange" program with his graduate students and researchers at the Scottish Center for Genomics Technology and Informatics at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom); the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University; and the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic at the University of California, Irvine. Researchers from the three institutes would visit Texas A&M, giving seminars on topics such as the human genome and its impact on medical care, or LASIK eye surgery. Graduate students would in turn visit the schools for a few weeks to gain a clinical and international perspective of biomedical engineering.

"The goal is to integrate research into the classroom," Yeh said, "and to present multidisciplinary perspectives on different biomedical engineering applications."

Yeh said the collaborations with the United Kingdom researchers came out of Texas A&M's participation in Texas-United Kingdom Collaborative Research Initiative. Yeh's graduate student exchange program will compliment a similar program in the biomedical engineering department's IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) application to the National Science Foundation.

Yeh joined the Texas A&M biomedical engineering faculty in 2003. He holds a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.

For more information, contact

Source: Dr. Alvin T. Yeh
ayeh@tamu.edu

Reporter: Lesley Kriewald
lesleyk@tamu.edu
(979) 845-5524

News Story 1166, May 10, 2005

Direct page link:
http://engineeringnews.tamu.edu/news/1166

Main News Page