Kai Wu
Texas Tech University, TX·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Magnetic fields can reveal what happens inside the body without surgery. They can show brain activity as it happens or track where tiny magnetic particles travel.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
magnetoencephalography
wearable neuroimaging
magnetic tunnel junction
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2027
What they work on
- Develop bendable magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) thin-film sensors that measure the field in three directions, with built-in electronics, to form scalp-conforming arrays for room-temperature magnetoencephalography.
- Create a two-way magnetic neural interface in cultured cells by combining sensing with magnetothermal stimulation, in which micro coils heat nanoscale magnetic materials to activate neurons.
- Test wearable flexible MEG arrays in freely moving animals, comparing them against electrophysiology, behavioral readouts and other imaging methods.
- Develop physics-aware compressed sensing and AI algorithms that use the sparse structure of neural signals for adaptive sampling and real-time reconstruction across large sensor arrays.
- Design spinel ferrite nanoparticle tracers doped with zinc, manganese or magnesium and coated with red blood cell membranes, giving each tracer a distinct magnetic signature for multi-tracer magnetic particle imaging.
- Separate signals from multiple tracers with a spectral 'colorization' algorithm, then reconstruct each channel with the Kaczmarz algorithm, testing resolution on 3D-printed phantoms at NIST.
More about the research
Current tools have limits, however. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) systems, which detect the faint magnetic fields produced by working neurons, are large and expensive. They also need cryogenic cooling and require the subject to stay still. Magnetic particle imaging (MPI), which images injected magnetic nanoparticles, can follow only one tracer at a time. Both of the lab's projects combine magnetic materials, sensing hardware and reconstruction algorithms to overcome these limits.
Why it matters
Wearable, room-temperature brain imaging could make brain recordings cheaper and easier to obtain, and allow studies during natural movement. Paired with magnetic stimulation, it could open a path to precise treatments for neurological disorders. Multi-tracer MPI could let doctors track several biological processes at once in diseases such as cancer, neurological disorders and heart conditions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alexey Tonyushkin
Oakland University, MI·Biomedical Engineering
Upgrade a single-sided magnetic particle imaging scanner built on a field-free line design so it can perform dynamic, multi-slice 3D imaging using mechanical rotation, height control of the field-free line and adjustable gradient strength.
Kerem Camsari
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Improve the energy efficiency of probabilistic bits (p-bits) by using voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) in spintronic devices.
Amay Bandodkar
North Carolina State University, NC·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Develop non-toxic sensor arrays based on biofuel cells, devices that convert a chemical reaction into an electrical signal, to detect molecular biomarkers of healing in wound exudate.
The school
Texas Tech University: 9 labs on PI Pages, $257M a year on research, 415 research doctorates a year.
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