Health Innovation Professor Michael Oelze
Michael Oelze
Health Innovation Professor, Biomedical and Translational Sciences
(217) 333-9226
4251 Beckman Institute
Bioacoustics Research Lab
Ultrasound | Bioimaging | Medical devices | Communications | Beamforming | Ultrasound Therapy | Breast Cancer
Projects Available for Carle Illinois College of Medicine Student Participation
Microbubble Contrast Agents - These agents are gas filled microbubbles with thin shells and can provide contrast in the vasculature. However, these microbubbles are also being used to produce therapeutic effects in humans. Understanding how these microbubbles react to ultrasound insonification is critical to future developments. We hypothesize that our novel super-resolution beamforming technique can image the oscillations of microbubbles at a high sampling rate. We’d like some students to become involved in the project of characterizing microbubble motion. Students would learn how to operate research ultrasound devices, some simple beamforming techniques, how ultrasound interacts with microbubbles and how to verify these oscillations with a high-speed camera.
Why I'm Motivated to be a HIP Faculty Member:
I have an interest in seeing the Carle Illinois College of Medicine grow into a successful medical school that develops physician innovators. With my participation as a HIP faculty, I hope to be able to contribute to the success of the college and to further develop fundamental but clinical research on campus.
Carle Illinois College of Medicine Related Research
Professor Oelze and his lab have research interests that span a wide range of topics related to biomedical ultrasound. They have been working for years on the development of novel quantitative ultrasound techniques. This work has progressed to clinical adaptation in the areas of identifying liver steatosis, identifying cancer and monitoring neoadjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer. They have worked with multiple companies to implement these techniques for use in the clinic. Professor Oelze and his team are actively researching novel beamforming techniques that make use of the nulls of a beam pattern to create images resulting much finer spatial resolution and mitigation of clutter produced by grating lobes. This technology was recently patented and has been demonstrated to provide super resolution and to do microvessel imaging. Prof Oelze is working with other labs to develop ultrasound activated mechanophores for therapy. His team is developing novel in body medical devices that communicate using ultrasound.