Multimodal Optical, Ultrasound and Photoacoustic Imaging Strategies for Pre-clinical and Clinical Applications

Advanced multimodal imaging techniques offer a powerful means to study complex disease mechanisms in pre-clinical models and to significantly enhance diagnostic and therapeutic outcomes in clinical settings. While conventional imaging technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Positron Emission Tomography, and X-Ray Computed Tomography have garnered substantial clinical relevance, their bulky nature and high cost render them impractical for point-of-care applications. Moreover, these modalities often lack the spatiotemporal resolution necessary to effectively capture dynamic events in rodent models. To address these limitations, we have developed novel multimodal optical, ultrasound, and photoacoustic imaging systems to provide complementary structural, functional, and molecular contrasts of living subjects in real-time. In this talk, I will present our multimodal imaging results covering pre-clinical and clinical applications in cancer and neuroscience, and our efforts to improve image fidelity using physics-aware AI models. As time permits, I will also briefly discuss the development of transparent ultrasound transducers and their applications for multimodal imaging and neuromodulation.

Dr. Raj Kothapalli is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Penn State Cancer Institute, at the Pennsylvania State University. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009 under the guidance of Dr. Lihong Wang. From 2009 to 2013, he received postdoctoral training from Dr. Sam Gambhir in the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford University. Dr. Kothapalli served as an instructor in the Department of Radiology at Stanford University from 2014 to 2016, during which time he conducted the first-in-human photoacoustic prostate imaging studies. Since 2017, he has led the BioPhotonics and Ultrasound Imaging lab at Penn State, which focuses on developing novel multimodal imaging strategies combining optical, ultrasound and photoacoustic technologies. Dr. Kothapalli was awarded the Hamalainen Peter Michael Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Sir Peter Michael Foundation (2009 to 2012), the K99-R00 NIH Pathway to Independence award in 2014, and the NSF CAREER award in 2023.