Dongkyun Kang
University of Arizona, AZ·Biomedical Engineering
Doctors often need to see cells inside the body, and today that usually means cutting out a tissue sample or using bulky, expensive equipment. Both projects build low-cost, handheld optical microscopes that show cellular detail in living patients without removing tissue.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
optical imaging
biomedical optics
portable confocal microscopy
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2030
What they work on
- Build a new portable confocal microscope (PCM) that rapidly and repeatably images Meissner's corpuscles, touch-sensing nerve endings in fingertip skin, in cancer patients.
- Evaluate whether PCM measurements of Meissner's corpuscle density can reliably assess chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) in patients receiving chemotherapy.
- Develop deep learning algorithms that automatically count Meissner's corpuscles in confocal skin images, giving a quantitative biomarker of nerve damage.
- Develop a probe-based light sheet microscope (pLSM) that uses natural light scattering to image cellular detail when placed directly on anal tissue during screening.
- Test the clinical usefulness of pLSM in an in vivo human study and build automated image analysis to identify high-grade precancerous lesions (HSIL).
More about the research
They pair each device with automated image analysis. One project targets nerve damage caused by cancer chemotherapy. The other targets screening for anal cancer.
Why it matters
Cancer patients on chemotherapy could gain an inexpensive, portable way to measure nerve damage. This could help doctors adjust treatment, spot patients at risk, and run better trials of CIPN prevention. People at high risk of anal cancer could benefit from more sensitive screening, fewer unnecessary biopsies of harmless lesions, and possibly same-day treatment. The pLSM device could also help train anoscopists.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jonathan Liu
University of Washington, WA·Biomedical Engineering
Build a multi-resolution hybrid open-top light-sheet microscope using a non-orthogonal dual-objective (NODO) design to improve resolution, imaging depth and compatibility with tissue-clearing protocols and sample holders.
Omar Harfouch
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Compare HPV16-specific CD4 and CD8 T cells, immune markers and L1 antibodies in blood between people with high estradiol/low testosterone and the reverse, using flow cytometry, stratified by HIV status.
Ronald Stanley
Missouri University of Science and Technology, MO·Engineering
Build an online platform with the International Skin Imaging Collaborative (ISIC) where experts worldwide annotate, segment and validate critical structures in dermoscopic skin lesion images.
The school
University of Arizona: 36 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 487 research doctorates a year.
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