Nanomedicine and Nano-biomedical Imaging
Porject 1: Multi-scale Modeling and Simulation of Bio-EM Transports in Nanothermotherapy
Project reports || Project presentations || Project publications
A thermotherapy (hyperthermia) can be regionally applied to a target tumor or to whole body, depending on the tumor position, the stage, and the health status of cancer patients. The major challenge in hyperthermia is to develop an efficient and clinically applicable method of providing a heat source I order to increase the tumor temperature for killing the tumor cells, while the normal cells remains alive. The temperature should be controllable. Nanothermotherapy has recently become a renewed research and clinical field that brings high promise and excitement to health care. One of the outstanding uses of nanothermotherapy in clinical trials is to induct ferromagnetic or superparamagnetism (SPM) nanoparticles into a regional tumor by injection or into the whole body of a patient by blood perfusion. By applying an external electromagnetic field, the nanoparticles help increase temperature and reorient the direction to target the tumor. The temperature profile in the tumor region is extremely sensitive to the result of the thermotherapy. 
The temperature distribution is influenced by a numerous of factors. Various effects should be intensively studied. The study requires a cross-domain research on the interactions of hyperthermia with tumor biological metabolism and its environments, angiogenesis and vasculature, blood perfusion, therapeutic gainof heat, the changes of tissue biophysical properties during therapeutic processing, as well as the inducted nanomaterials. The associated multi-scale model should be incorporated into a tool to evaluate the therapy functions, features, and finaleffects for health can safety using nanoparticels. The model must be on multi-scales (nano-/micro-/macroscopic) in the physiological and biophysical system, in where chemical and physical transport phenomena take place. The lack of such model inspirits this challenging project.
This project aims to develop a software tool that has a generic, multi-scale, and multi-mediummathematical model of bio-EM-transport phenomena in hyperthermia. The model accounts for the therapeutic process parameter analysis and design, nanoparticles motion, size, shape, microscopic cell structure and vasculature, micro-fluid vessel perfusion, all the transport conservations with physics-based constitutional laws and supplemental models, interfacial/interstitial and heat and mass transfers (including blood perfusion expressions, chemical reactions during metabolism, etc.). The model equations will be implemented numerically and conducted using high performance computing systems. The model and simulation help to develop a clinical computer-aided design (CCAD) for future nanothermotherapy.
a. Microscopic conservation equations
b. Volume avergaed techniques
c. Macroscopic conservation equations
Medical Imaging and Radiology Informatics (MIRI)
Medical Imaging Information System (MIIS) 
Parallel Computing for Medical Imaging (PCMI) 
Modeling of Biotransport in
Biological Systems (MBBS)
Optical Imaging Tomography and Applications (OITA) 
Stereological Analysis and Tumor Volume Metrics (SATVM) 
Stereotactic Atlas for the Anatomic Topology (SAAT)
Coupled Diffusions for Image Enhencement (DDIE) 
Nanomedicine and nanobiomedical imaging (NMNI)
Knowledge-based CAD for breast imaging (KCBI)
