Dr. Irving Bigio

Professor Irving Bigio
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics and Medicine,
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts

"Elastic Light Scattering Spectroscopy for the Detection of Pre-Cancer"

Optical spectroscopy mediated by fiber-optic probes can be used to perform noninvasive, or minimally-invasive, real-time assessment of tissue pathology in-situ. The method of elastic-scattering spectroscopy (ESS) is sensitive to the sub-cellular architectural changes, such as nuclear grade and nuclear to cytoplasm ratio, mitochondrial size and density, etc., which correlate with features used by pathologists when performing histological assessment. The ESS method senses those morphology changes without actually imaging the microscopic structure. Clinical demonstrations of ESS have been conducted in a variety of organ sites, with promising, and larger-scale clinical studies are now ongoing. We have recently developed an analytical model that extracts, from the ESS spectra, the underlying physical correlates of the tissue relating to disease.

Irving J. Bigio received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Michigan in 1974. From then until 2000 he was a scientific staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory (New Mexico), including service as Leader of the Laser Science and Applications Program (1988-1994). He has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, a Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and a Guest Fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Oxford, England. Dr. Bigio holds a number of patents for biomedical optics instrumentation, and has received three R&D-100 Awards for the development of biomedical optical devices. Since February 2001 he has been at Boston University, where he is Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Physics, and Medicine. Dr. Bigio serves on several government advisory panels and on external advisory boards for companies and academic institutions. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and is a member of the American Physical Society and the SPIE. In addition to other research projects in biomedical optics, Dr. Bigio recently led a multi-institutional program under the NIH/NCI Network for Translational Research in Optical Imaging, comprising several medical research centers in the US and Europe.