Gijs van Soest, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Biomedical Engineering Thorax Center, Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Cardiovascular Photonics-Imaging Atherosclerosis and Coronary Interventions

The rise of optical techniques in cardiovascular medicine has produced myriad new insights in coronary artery disease and coronary interventions. I will present our work on imaging of coronary and carotid artery atherosclerosis, discussing how plaque composition can be assessed using a combination of light and ultrasound. Interventions in the coronary vasculature rely upon accurate prior knowledge of the local geometry. In the second part of the talk I will focus on recent innovations in intravascular OCT imaging that allow high-fidelity, distortion-free imaging of the coronary vessels in vivo by boosting the speed of acquisition to > 4000 frames per second.

Biography: Gijs van Soest is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering Thorax Center, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam. His research focuses on the use and development of intravascular imaging methods for detection of coronary atherosclerosis, including optical coherence tomography, high-frequency ultrasound, and photoacoustics. These developments are carried out in close collaboration with clinicians of the Department of Interventional Cardiology. He was trained as an experimental physicist at the University of Groningen (MSc 1997), and did his graduate research on the interplay of light scattering and laser physics at the University of Amsterdam (PhD 2001). After a few years researching atmospheric remote sensing, he joined the Thorax Center.

Location
1005 GBSF