A new center that stands to transform surgical procedures and brain monitoring on a national scale using light-based, artificial intelligence-informed technologies will soon be part of at the ÁńÁ«ĘÓƵ, Davis, thanks to a recent $6.3 million P41 grant from NIH’s .
The National Center for Interventional Biophotonic Technologies, or NCIBT, will advance two optical imaging technologies developed at UC Davis — interventional fluorescence lifetime imaging, or iFLIM, and interferometric diffuse optical spectroscopy, or iDOS — and combine them with an AI-deep learning platform to provide real-time guidance of decision-making during medical and surgical procedures. The center will support research and development, clinical application, and training and education of the new technologies and promote their adoption to improve the quality of interventional health care.
“We are developing a new technological paradigm for surgical and interventional medical decision-making,” said Laura Marcu, founding director of NCIBT and professor in the UC Davis College of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. “This technology will help surgeons and other physicians make decisions in real time by assessing the local tissue’s constituents, physiology and pathology, and integrating this imaging data with preoperative and other intraoperative imaging data and information from a patient’s history, to optimize the procedure.”
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The grant will also support the establishment of a physical center at UC Davis’ Aggie Square. This will include state-of-the-art laboratories, teaching space, learning centers and the organizational headquarters of the center’s training and education programs.
“Aggie Square supports advancements of biomedical technologies and close collaborations among engineers, clinician-scientists and industry. These promote development of clinically useful tools and dissemination of these discoveries and tools through teaching, training and commercialization,” said Griff Harsh, professor and chair of neurological surgery at UC Davis Health, and deputy director and training leader of NCIBT. “We believe that the NCIBT embodies the mission and vision of Aggie Square.”
NCIBT adds to the growing number of AI-based centers at UC Davis, including the , or AIFS, and , or CeDAR.
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The highly competitive P41 grant is one of the NIH-NIBI