Abstract: Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) images nuclear and cellular patterns and morphology in human skin in vivo and detects skin lesions and cancers with sensitivity of ~90% and specificity of ~70%.  When RCM imaging is combined with dermoscopy to noninvasively guide the diagnosis of melanoma and basal cell carcinoma skin cancers, the specificity increases by ~2-3X and, consequently, the benign-to-malignant biopsy ratio decreases by ~50-70%, compared to that with dermoscopy alone.  Following more than two decades of technology development and clinical research, RCM imaging in combination with dermoscopy is now advancing into routine practice in clinical settings worldwide, to rule out malignancy and biopsy, sparing patients from biopsies of benign lesions.  The success of RCM, notwithstanding, our past remains prologue for what we have yet to accomplish.  Yet to be solved problems - shallow depth, blind navigation, qualitative image reading - are being addressed by combining RCM with optical coherence tomography (OCT), widefield imaging and machine learning.  Emerging clinical advances are in combined RCM-OCT imaging to guide diagnosis-and-treatment and follow up management.  In this seminar, we will look at the past, present and future state of the field.

Bio: Dr. Milind Rajadhyaksha develops and translates confocal microscopes for imaging-guided noninvasive diagnosis, treatment and management of skin and oral/head-neck cancers.  He is a Member of the faculty in the Dermatology Service, Department of Medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine (New York, NY).  His work spans the entire spectrum from bench to bedside: laboratory research through commercialization through clinical studies to clinical implementation, and he enjoys working in the "valley of death" - and living through frequent near-death experiences - between laboratory and clinic and between academia and industry.  Two of his microscopes have been commercialized (VivaScopes, Caliber Imaging and Diagnostics, Rochester, NY), translated through clinical trials and are now in routine clinical use at the bedside to noninvasively guide diagnosis, treatment and management of skin cancers.  He wildly fantasizes about a future in which a multimodal optical imaging approach may routinely guide integrated diagnosis-and-treatment in a single patient visit – a "one stop shop" noninvasive "see-and-treat and then manage” patient care paradigm - in skin, oral/head-neck and other clinical settings.  He is a very proud Boilermaker with MS (1988) and PhD (1991) degrees in mechanical engineering from Purdue University. 

Historic quote of the week:  "One of the goals of engineering is to achieve the ratio of the measured value to the predicted value to be as close to 1.0 as possible."  Leslie A. Geddes, founder of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue,  est. 1974

Zoom link: https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/5593290378?omn=91337572863

*Students registered for the seminar are expected to attend in-person