#6 Refined List of Research Topics

T1 Improvement
T1 is a time value associated with the time it takes atomic particles within tissue (as it pertains to MRI) to return to an equilibrium state. Although T1 is a time value, it can actually be thought of as representing the density, and therefore the general health of a certain structure in the brain. For example, healthy 'white matter' on the brain surface exhibits a T1 of about 900 ms, grey matter ~1200 ms, and a severely progressed lesion (scar on the surface of the brain often found in individuals with multiple sclerosis) has a T1 of about 4000 ms. The problem with measuring T1 is that the certainty with which a T1 can be estimated severely degrades in quality as the T1 increases. So that is why I said a lesion exhibits a T1 of about 4000 ms, because there's really no resolution to the scale at those high values. An MRI scan is conducted with two parameters: flip angle and repetition time. These two parameters determine how well the T1 can be measured, but each T1 has an optimal set of flip angle(s) and repetition time(s), and each parameter can be greatly varied. So, the question is, how do we determine how many flip angles and repetition times to use to accurately measure the T1 of interested, and which flip angles and repetition times should we use? The answer is good old fashioned number crunching. The program MATLAB can do these kinds of calculations, but a 'simulation' can take days.

Biological Signals
Measuring biological signals is of great importance to the medical field. It is extremely valuable to be able to quantify a value and to be able to analyze it. The problem with biological signals is that they are usually very small in amplitude and the time in which they occur is often very short. The time when a certain signal takes place is called an 'event,' and some methods to measure these biological signals are simply not able to measure these signals accurately and quickly enough due to limitations in the current state of the art. It would be like me telling you that a fruit fly whizzes past your face once every five minutes, and does so in less than second. It may not happen every five minutes, but it will happen at least once in a five minute period. You have no way of knowing when the fly will come by, and when he does, will you be ready with your swatter? As transistors continue to get smaller and smaller, our ability to capture and analyze data will hopefully improve similarly. The ability to 'listen' to these biological signals is of great interest to me.

Mimicking healthy human body systems
The human body is truly an amazing machine. It may even be the most sophisticated and most advanced machine on the planet (OK…not just the human body; indeed, any biological system). Having said this, I liken the efforts of bioengineering to trying to mimic with hardware/software that which was perfectly designed (or not?) by something else. Whether you believe biological systems were 'designed' or not, I think anyone would agree that a biological system is an incredibly complex machine which science and technology has not yet fully come to understand. As science, technology, and medicine progress in the next few years, it will be very exciting to see how artificial organs are designed. Research groups have had much success with designing artificial organs so I'm very excited to see where the field goes in the future. I never say that anything is impossible, but to accomplish anything like these ideas will certainly be challenging.