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Lihong Wang fell in love with light-based science during his high school years, when he saw a laser being used in a sci-fi movie. "I watched that laser and thought, ‘Wow, this is really powerful,'" recalls Wang. "There's nothing in nature that collimates so well, projects so far. I thought, ‘This has to be really useful.' Think about it: a man-made, purified light source that, even then, I assumed could be broadly used. I was fascinated by it." He decided then and there to study laser physics.
Wang, an SPIE Fellow, winner of the 2015 SPIE Britton Chance Biomedical Optical Award, former editor of the SPIE Journal of Biomedical Optics, and the Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Caltech's Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, has pursued that fascination to groundbreaking ends: his team has developed a photoacoustic breast-imaging system fast enough to complete a scan of an entire breast within a single breath hold. It's an innovative, noninvasive, fast, painless, affordable system for screening breasts and other biological tissue, one that Wang has described as a "dream machine." The team's work was described in a paper published in Nature Communications earlier this year.
Wang's photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) uses light, sound, and math to achieve high-resolution optical imaging in deep tissues on multiple levels: structural, functional, and molecular. This technique, notes Wang, could prove to be better than other current modalities in terms of efficiency, clarity, and safety. "In detecting the functional changes, sometimes you can do better than just looking at a structure," he says. "MRI and x-ray mammography can see structures; we can see functions as well. It's important to see the function because sometimes the structure alone is misleading. Our system offers fine spatial resolution as well."
