Ipek Oguz
Vanderbilt University, TN·Biomedical Engineering
Some of the most serious problems of early life are hard to see. Doctors struggle to view the fine blood vessels in a premature baby's eye, and they lack practical ways to watch the placenta grow during pregnancy.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Computer Science
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
retinopathy of prematurity
optical coherence tomography
OCT angiography
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Develop custom handheld spectrally encoded coherence tomography and reflectometry (SECTR) hardware, an eye-imaging system combining OCT and surface reflectance, for point-of-care imaging of infant eyes.
- Build image-analysis pipelines for handheld SECTR that correct infant motion and stitch scans into mosaics to measure retinal vessel dilation and tortuosity in 3D.
- Validate SECTR by longitudinally imaging structural and vascular changes in preterm infants with retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) to assess its value for treatment decisions.
- Refine and validate a fetal-placental growth model using automated early placental volume from 3D ultrasound and placental histopathology, the microscopic study of placental tissue.
- Extend automated placenta segmentation to later pregnancy and add measures of placental shape and vascularity, then combine them with serum biomarkers in a model for monitoring fetal growth.
More about the research
Both gaps delay care. The lab's projects build medical imaging hardware and automated image-analysis software that turn these hard-to-get images into reliable, quantitative measurements that can be used at the bedside.
Why it matters
Preterm infants at risk of blindness from retinopathy of prematurity could benefit from portable eye imaging that catches retinal detachment and vessel changes often missed today, supporting timely treatment. Pregnant patients could benefit from bedside placental assessment that better flags fetal growth restriction and may help prevent stillbirth.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jennifer Kang-Mieler
Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ·Biomedical Engineering
Optimize and test an animal-to-human (A2H) model that converts animal retinal images into human-like images, using an existing retinal image dataset, to enlarge training data for ROP diagnosis.
Yali Jia
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Biomedical Engineering
Build a 1-MHz, 120° wide-field, high-resolution OCTA system with GPU real-time processing that captures reliable retinal blood-flow images in a single scan, without stitching images together.
Donald Miller
Indiana University, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Measure the spectral sensitivity, or color response, of individual photoreceptors in the living human eye using adaptive-optics optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) with phase-sensitive detection.
The school
Vanderbilt University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 494 research doctorates a year.
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