Invited talk by Dmitry D Postnov

Abstract:

Diabetes, dementia, hypertension, stroke, and even ageing - the world's leading causes of death and disability are strongly associated with something going wrong in the blood vessels. This link has made diagnosing and monitoring vascular abnormalities one of the key drivers in developing imaging technologies and medical image analysis over the past decades. However, despite the advances in magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound techniques or multi-photon microscopy, many physiological and clinical questions remain a mystery, therefore calling for faster, higher-resolution and less invasive imaging tools and more intelligent analysis algorithms to answer them. In this talk, I will discuss the recent work done in my lab to advance optical blood flow imaging methods and use them to unveil the mysteries of microvasculature and improve disease diagnostics. In particular, I will focus on the stiffness of small blood vessels, which conventional techniques cannot assess without surgical intervention. I will introduce a novel hypothesis on the pivotal role of increased microvascular stiffness in dementia and present a new high-speed laser speckle imaging tool and a multi-parametric approach that we developed to make it possible to image stiffness and test the hypothesis.
 

Bio:

Dr Postnov is an assistant professor and the Lundbeck Fellow at the CFIN, Department of Clinical Medicine, with primary interests in biomedical engineering and blood flow imaging. He earned his PhD in cardiovascular physiology from the University of Copenhagen, complemented by MSc in Physics and a secondary BSc degree in Computer Science. In 2021 he established the Blood Flow Imaging group at CFIN, primarily focusing on developing imaging methods and studying brain perfusion in health and disease.