Bubbles for medical imaging and therapy

by Invited Speaker prof. dr. Michel Versluis, Professor of Physical and Medical Acoustics, University of Twente

Bubbles are important for a large variety of applications in medical acoustics, including contrast imaging and ultrasound-assisted therapy. For example, stabilized microbubbles are used as contrast agents for ultrasound imaging and aid in delineation, perfusion and flow imaging.

Acoustically driven bubbles can promote efficient mixing on the microscale through acoustic streaming and stable cavitation. Microbubbles can also be decorated with a payload which carries great potential for their use as drug delivery agents in the context of personalized medical therapy.

Key to all these emerging applications is a precise acoustic control of the interaction of ultrasound with the bubbles. The challenge here is the combined microscopic length scales and ultrashort time scales associated with the mechanisms controlling bubble and droplet formation and its activation processes, which we solve by high-resolution ultrafast microscopy, even down to the nanosecond.

Interview

What drives you?

To understand how things work

Why should the delegate attend your presentation?

Entertaining videos, no equations

What emerging technologies/trends do you see as having the greatest potential in the short and long run?

Molecular imaging with ultrasound and therapeutic nanomedicine;

What kind of impact do you expect them to have?

Safe, fast and precise imaging and therapies

What are the barriers that might stand in the way?

The biggest challenge is a rapid clinical translation jont with the medical device industry

Michel Versluis graduated with a degree in physics in 1988 from the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with an interest in molecular physics and astrophysics. He specialized in the application of lasers for flame diagnostics, completing his PhD in 1992. After research positions in Brisbane, Australia, Lund, Sweden and Delft, The Netherlands he joined the Physics of Fluids group of the University of Twente in 1999. Dr. Versluis is now full professor Physical and Medical Acoustics. He is an expert in ultra high-speed imaging with a particular interest in the use of microbubbles and microdroplets for medical applications, both in imaging and in therapy, and in the physics and control of bubbles and droplets in microfluidic applications in medicine and in the nanotechnology industry.

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