Sarah Patch

Research:

Algorithm development for direct image reconstruction is Dr. Patch's area of expertise, with current research focus on 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 are hypothesized to 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.

Biographical Sketch:

Sarah Patch received her B.S. in Mathematics & Computational Sciences from Stanford University in 1989 and her Ph.D in Applied Math from UC Berkeley in 1994. She then obtained a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences and worked at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications from 1994 to 1995. In 1995, she was awarded a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the University of Muenster, Germany. The following year Patch went back to Stanford University. From 1997 to 1999 Patch held a position GE’s Corporate Research and Development Center; in 2005 she joined GE Medical Systems’ Applied Science Lab in Milwaukee.

Since 2005, Sarah Patch has been working at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she holds the rank of Associate Professor. Professor Patch has received more than 10 patents and her current research is supported by a UW-Milwaukee Research Growth Initiative Award.

Selected publications:

• GW Hanson, SK Patch,
  "Optimum Heating of Nanoparticle Thermal Contrast Agents at RF Frequencies,"
  Journal of Applied Physics, 106, #054309 (2009).
• B. Treeby, B. Cox, E.Z. Zhang, S.K. Patch, P.C. Beard,
  "Measurement of broadband temperature-dependent ultrasonic attenuation and dispersion using photoacoustics,"
  IEEE Trans on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Freq Control, 56(8), pp. 1666-1676, (2009). 
• D. Fallon, L. Yan, G.W.Hanson, S.K. Patch,
  "RF Testbed for Thermoacoustic Tomography,"
  Review of Scientific Instruments, 80, #064301, (2009).
  
• S. K. Patch, O. Scherzer,
  “Photo- and Thermo-Acoustic Imaging,”
  Inverse Problems 23 S01-S10, (2007). 

• S. K. Patch,
  "Photoacoustic and Thermoacoustic Tomography - Consistency Conditions and the Partial Scan Problem"
  in Photoacoustic Imaging and Spectroscopy, CRC Press, (2008).