Modern imaging methods greatly exceed the possibilities of X-rays.
Vasilis Ntziachristos holds the Chair of Biological Imaging at the
Technical University of Munich (TUM) and is Director of the Institute
for Biological and Medical Imaging at Helmholtz Zentrum München. In this
interview, he talks about the fascination of imaging techniques and
about finding a common language for engineers and doctors.
Professor Ntziachristos, you have been working on imaging techniques for quite a while now. How did you end up in this field?
I began working with imaging very early on. Back in 1993, I received
my diploma for a thesis on Magnetic Resonance Imaging electronics and
sequences. Since then, I looked into several different ways of making
biological information visible - optical techniques, radio frequency
imaging, combinations with X-ray, CT, MRI and ultrasound - but it has
always been imaging.
What is it about imaging that got you?
Images are a fundamental way of understanding the world. They say an
image is worth a thousand words, and it's true. Take biology: There is a
lot of information to be found in the spatial relation of biological
contrast and interworking of cell populations. It is fascinating when
you visualize processes that are usually hidden. Using technology, we
can for instance see what happens functionally in tissues. Not just the
anatomy, but also the distribution of cells or molecular information,
such as the concentration of oxygen within different tissues.
You received praise, awards, and research grants for several research projects. How many different imaging techniques are you and your colleagues working on?
We have three major directions: fluorescence imaging,
thermoacoustics, and optoacoustics. Within these fields, we work on
different devices and different applications. In optoacoustics, for
example, we have three microscope implementations with very different
abilities; we have developed three different mesoscopes for skin and
subsurface tissue visualization and several other optoacoustic devices.
Overall, there are at least ten different implementations of the
technology, probably more, depending on how you count.
Your optoacoustic devices are in various stages of development. How long will it be until the first one of them will be in everyday use in hospitals?
In biomedical technology, this is always a long process. There
actually are optoacoustic systems in hospitals today for research
purposes but not for everyday routine use. We believe, however, that it
won't be long until these methods are used in cardiology, in cancer,
dermatology, and other fields. Through research and through tests in
clinical environments we should be able to find the key diagnostic and
theranostic applications in the next two to three years.
What are the typical problems if you want to adapt a technology you developed for practical use?
You need to be able to bridge the gap between engineering and
medicine. Engineers tend to develop technologies because they can be
developed and because it is scientifically interesting to develop them.
Everyday use, however, comes from not only having a good technology but
from solving an unmet clinical need. You have to find a common language
to understand the needs of medical doctors.
How do you address this in your projects?
When we developed the proposal for Innoderm - a handheld device for
dermatologists that we are currently working on - we sat down and talked
to several dermatologists at Klinikum rechts der Isar. It turned out
that there are several unmet needs. One of them, for example is to
assess treatment of the skin accurately and quantitatively. It is
important to quickly understand if a certain treatment works or if a
different therapeutic approach must be followed. As a next step, we go
into the clinic to do pilot studies to show the feasibility of our
techniques and then a more extensive study to show the clinical value.
The Innoderm project, which started in March, is going to last for five
years. In the first two years we are going to improve the technology and
adapt it to solving particular problems. Then, we are going to apply it
to further clinical tests.
Apart from Innoderm, where are your goals right now?
We want to identify where we can really have an impact on society
and health care with our technology. We have many ideas about how to
further evolve ways of sensing and visualizing information that is
invisible as of yet and can lead to earlier and more accurate diagnosis.
You could say that half of our activity is dedicated to this goal. The
other half will remain on the technical development of devices.
Prof. Dr. Vasilis Ntziachristos
Vasilis Ntziachristos as assistant professor and Director of the Laboratory for Bio-Optics and Molecular Imaging at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, before being appointed to the Chair of Biological Imaging at TUM. The Chair is closely linked with the Institute for Biological and Medical Imaging at Helmholtz Zentrum München, of which Prof. Ntziachristos is Director. Among other honors, Prof. Ntziachristos received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and several grants by the European Research Council (ERC).
INNODERM
With "Innoderm" TUM is heading a European research project, where engineers and physicians together develop a new optoacoustic handheld instrument for early diagnosis of skin cancer. The goal is to provide the physicians with a tool that allows on site-assessment of morphological, physiological and cellular changes of the skin area examined not only by inspecting the skin surface, but also sub-surface features within several millimeters of depth. The project combines the expertise of engineers, scientists and clinicians in a consortium comprising five partners from four European countries. The project has been awarded a grant of 3,8 million € from Horizon 2020, the EU framework program for research and innovation.
