Imaging in a “Stressful” Environment
Level - UndergradYou are part of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bioengineering Research Partnership (BRP) team investigating the distribution of stress and strain in atherosclerotic plaques in relation to markers of inflammation and apoptosis. One of the groups that make up this BRP team is developing a three-dimensional finite element model of the mechanical properties of vessel walls of coronary arteries. A cardiac surgeon on the team will prepare 5-cm long in vitro samples of human coronary arteries from explanted human hearts obtained at the time of cardiac transplantation to aid in the experimental verification of this accuracy of this model. A pressurizing column containing physiologic (HBBS) solution will be used to apply to the sample arterial pressures in the physiologic range.
Your group is responsible for developing an in vitro imaging technique that is capable of visualizing and quantifying the strain induced in the arterial wall of this sample in response to a change in the arterial pressure. The stress-strain relationships that are measured using your technique will be compared to those predicted by the model in order to establish its accuracy. Your group is aware of previous research showing that ultrasonic imaging techniques (see for example [1]) are capable of imaging vessel walls with a resolution of roughly 50 m. The principal investigator (PI) of the team wants you to develop an imaging system for this application that is capable of higher resolution than that possible with ultrasound. Of course, the PI also wants you to do this as economically as possible, and has given you a supply budget of $100k to work with.
You do not need to address image processing software development as part of your solution (i.e. focus your attention only on the imaging “hardware”, not the processing of the image data).
1. F. S. Foster et al, “Advances in ultrasound biomicroscopy,” Ultrasound in Med. & Biol., vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 1-27, 2000.