Optically Guided Surgery-John Black, PhD.-04/06/2010 - 8:30am

Event Information
Event Topic: 
Optically Guided Surgery
Event Date: 
04/06/2010 - 8:30am
Event Location: 
Sunnyvale City Council Chambers, 456 West Olive Ave., Sunnyvale, CA
Speaker Information
Event Speaker: 
John Black, PhD.
Event Speaker Title: 
VP of Imaging
Event Speaker Company: 
Avinger, Inc.
Event Speaker Bio: 

John Black has 16 years of experience in the medical, commercial and research segments of the photonics industry. At Avinger, he leads the engineering effort in the development of image-guided catheters for the treatment of peripheral and coronary artery disease. Prior to Avinger, he led the optical engineering team at FoxHollow Technologies in the successful development of the first-in-man intravascular real-time image-guided plaque excision catheter (Nighthawk™). http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/51482.php.

At Coherent Medical he was the manager of the Laser / Tissue Engineering group spearheading the development of flagship surgical, ophthalmic and dermatologic applications of lasers. While at Coherent he pioneered a new treatment of cutaneous vascular lesions which led to the development of the Cynosure Cynergy™ Vascular Workstation (unfortunately not the Coherent Cynergy Vascular Workstation). Also at Coherent he co-discovered the first laser-activated intravascular blood-pool MRI contrast agent. After Coherent he joined Lightwave Electronics (now JDSU, Inc.) working initially on advanced fiber lasers for RGB projection systems in consumer electronics ( http://www.sony.net/Products/SC-HP/cx_news/vol40/sideview.html), and subsequently on the laser design for the industry-leading Xcyte™ mode-locked ultraviolet laser for flow cytometry.

John has a B.Sc. in Chemistry with First Class Honors and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Nottingham. He received the T.J. King Memorial Prize for undergraduate physical chemistry research and an SERC / NATO Research Fellowship to do post-doctoral research in photochemistry at Stanford University. He was also a post-doctoral research fellow at Columbia University developing new lasers for molecular spectroscopy and reaction dynamics. He has lectured widely both in the US and abroad on laser spectroscopy and applications in medicine, and has several well-cited publications in these areas. John has 4 issued patents and several pending applications in the fields of laser development, trans-dermal cardiac output monitoring, optical diagnostics, and medical devices. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of OSA, APS, SPIE and Sigma Xi. He has also been a Guest Lecturer at the University of Arizona Biomedical Engineering Program, and is a peer-reviewer for several high-impact journals including Optics Express, Optics Communications, Lasers in Surgery and Medicine and the Springer “Series in Optical Sciences” books.

Event Details
Cost: 
$0 - Free
Event Details: 

The introduction of the laser as a therapeutic surgical tool in the 1960's has had a profound effect on certain fields of medicine, particularly in ophthalmology and more recently in minimally invasive surgical disciplines such as urology. The use of laser-based optical diagnostic tools, both as stand-alone devices and coupled to other instruments has recently started to blossom as many of the advances in electronics, computing and optical telecommunications of the last decade make their way into the biophotonics field. The enabling features of light-based diagnostics include the ability to use fiber-optics, sometimes with outer diameters as small as 50 microns as conduits for information, the extremely high intrinsic bandwidths and signal-to-noise of optical systems, and the possibility of using both the spectral and coherence properties of laser light to yield simultaneously both functional (molecular level) and structural (tissue organization) information.

John will present a tour of how optical techniques available today can be used to sense temperature, pH, and force, and show how the optical analog of ultrasound, Optical Coherence Tomography, is being used to equip surgical instruments with the ability to allow the physician to image the tissue they are interacting with and to make a treatment decision in real time, with 10-micron precision, all with minimal mechanical and cost impact on the surgical tool. Examples from thermal coagulation (ablation) and intravascular plaque excision will be discussed.