We were awarded the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) Biomedical Modeling Pilot award for studying intra-tumor heterogeneity of colorectal cancer tumor microenvironment.

Proc. SPIE 11653, Quantitative Phase Imaging VII, 1165318 (5 March 2021)

We present our results on computational modeling of nanoscale nuclear architecture mapping of epithelial cells undergoing malignant transformation and show preliminary results on them capturing underlying chromatin reorganization.

Am. J. Physiol. Gastrointest. Liver Physiol. 320(3):G396-G410

This study presents the development of a pre-clinical ex vivo system for testing efficacy and target engagement of therapeutics in inflammatory bowel disease using freshly obtained and well-characterized human colorectal tissue from patients with ulcerative colitis. Tofacitinib based JAK/STAT signaling inhibition was used to test the system. We performed the computational and statistical analyses.

Clin. Gastroenterol. Hepatol., Dec 02, 2020.

Drs. Das and Singhi led this study on the the role of tumor size difference between preoperative endoscopic ultrasound imaging and postoperative pathology in neoadjuvant-treated pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma patients as a potential prognostic indicator in subsequent chemotherapeutic management.

Nat. Commun.; 1:3515 (2020).

Our study utilizes highly multiplexed immunofluorescence imaging and spatial systems biology to predict risk of colorectal cancer recurrence, and identify emergent spatial domain networks and the spatial dependence of the consensus molecular subtypes of cancerassociated with this recurrence.

in Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) ,OSA Technical Digest (Optica Publishing Group, 2020), paper JTu2F.7.

CLEO: Applications and Technology 2020, Washington, DC United States (10–15 May 2020)

We will present a poster on our early work on compressed sensing in optical coherence tomography. We will present compressed sensing-based sampling and scrambling strategies for spectral-domain optical coherence tomography and their performance evaluation. We will show that the latter can be used for reconstructing both spatially sparse and non-sparse signals.

Cancer Prev. Res.,12(8) 527-538 (2019)

Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) colitis are at an increased risk of developing colorectal cancer and are currently recommended to undergo extensive annual or biennial colonoscopy, a costly and invasive procedure. Most surveillance colonoscopies are negative with no existing objective measures for assessing their risk of developing cancer. Our paper extends the less invasive, cost-effective and objective nanoscale nuclear architecture mapping (nanoNAM) method - a derivative of Fourier-domain Optical Coherence Tomography - to three dimensions (3D) , and applies it to detecting colorectal neoplasia in patients with inflammatory bowel disease from normal-appearing rectal biopsies.

Featured on the cover of the August 1, 2019 issue of Cancer Prevention Research (AACR).

Proc. SPIE 11076, Advances in Microscopic Imaging II, 1107611 (22 July 2019)

Invited paper, SPIE/OSA European Conferences on Biomedical Optics (ECBO) 2019:, SPIE/OSA European Conferences on Biomedical Optics (ECBO) 2019, 23-27 June 2019, Munich, Germany; Paper 11076-38 (2019).

One of the greatest challenges for early cancer detection is how to effectively manage patients who are at risk for developing invasive cancer. As most at-risk patients will not develop cancer, frequent and invasive surveillance of at risk patients carries financial, physical, and emotional burdens. But clinicians lack tools to accurately predict which patients will likely progress into malignancy. With our increased understanding of molecular changes in cancer development, it is now established that disrupted epigenome that can alter nuclear architecture occurs in all stages of cancer development including in normal precursor cells. Therefore, assessment of nanoscale nuclear architecture represents a promising strategy for identifying pre-cancerous changes. Here we present the development of three dimensional nuclear architecture mapping (3D-nanoNAM) to assess the depth-resolved properties of phase objects with slowly varying refractive index without a strong interface, based on a variant form of Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT). By computing the Fourier phase of the FD-OCT signal resulting from the light back-scattered by cell nuclei, 3D-nanoNAM quantifies, with nanoscale sensitivity, the depth-resolved alterations in mean nuclear optical density, and localized heterogeneity in optical density of the cell nuclei. We demonstrate that 3D-nanoNAM distinguishes high-risk patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) colitis from those at low-risk via/through imaging tissue sections that appear histologically normal according to pathologists. As 3D-nanoNAM uses clinically prepared formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue sections, it can be integrated into the clinical workflow.