Inverse scattering for coherent optical and radar imaging systems

Have you ever wondered what the inside of a tadpole looks like but did not want to dissect or hurt it? T. Ralston has the answer, he will show us a method that allows medical personnel to look under the skin and see at a microscopic resolution, in 3 dimensions, and in some cases in real-time (see video above of a tadpole's heart beating).

This will be a fascinating talk for anyone interested in scattering, optics, synthetic aperture radar, and medicine. Please feel free to invite your friends!

Details:

5:30 PM, Monday, 10 May

Inverse scattering for coherent optical and radar imaging systems

Tyler S. Ralston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory

This talk will juxtapose an emerging broadband optical imaging technology, interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM), with the well-known synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a method for imaging with millimeter electromagnetic waves. ISAM is a new technique for 3-D noninvasive biophotonic imaging. The hardware for ISAM is derived from the widely-used optical coherence tomography (OCT), a low-coherence interferometric (LCI) ranging technique with micron resolution deep (1-2 mm) within biological tissues. Both methods take advantage of the fact that the data are samples of a linear functional of the fields, and that the fields are connected to the object susceptibility function through Maxwell's equations. The susceptibility function, or a filtered version of it, is determined in terms of the known data by solving this system of equations. New advances in algorithms and computing hardware have enabled real-time ISAM – an important step toward enabling widespread clinical use.

Tyler S. Ralston received his Bachelors degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Dayton (2000). Prior to earning his Masters and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois (2006), he worked as an electrical engineer in the medical products industry at Battelle Memorial Institute (1998-2001). After his PhD, he worked as a post doctorate research scientist at the Beckman Institute (2006-2007) developing optical systems and algorithms for biomedical research applications. In 2007, he began working in his current position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory developing algorithms for radar and optical systems.

Meeting will be held at MIT Lincoln Laboratory A-Café, 244 Wood Street, Lexington, MA. For directions please see:http://www.ll.mit.edu/about/map.html

For more information, contact Antennas & Propagation chair, Gregory Charvat at Gregory.charvat@ll.mit.edu