The Research of Sarah Patch

Algorithm development for direct image reconstruction is Dr. Patch's area of expertise. Her current research focus is thermoacoustic tomography (TCT), a hybrid imaging technique. Her long-term goal is to quantify the robustness of TCT across different sizes, depths, and types of cancer. Ideally, TCT deposits electromagnetic (EM) energy impulsively in time and uniformly throughout the imaging object, causing thermal expansion. Cancerous masses preferentially absorb EM energy, heat and expand faster than neighboring healthy tissue, creating a pressure wave which is detected by ultrasound transducers at the edge of the object. Dr. Patch has developed an inversion formula for idealized TCT data and now works to account for physical and experimental effects upon TCT data. Other areas of research include cone beam reconstruction of xray CT data and motion correction for Propeller MRI. Early work in diffuse tomography was motivated by optical/NIR imaging.

Summer 2013 Student Involvement - primarily focused on incorporating a research friendly ultrasound system into the testbed.   LabView and MATLAB software programming will be required.  Click here for details.