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Narasimhan Rajaram, B.S. Graduate Research Assistant Department of Biomedical Engineering The University of Texas at Austin Office: ENS 10D 512.232.2109 n.rajaram@mail.texas.edu

Early detection can drastically reduce mortality and morbidity associated to most cancers. My research is primarily focused on the design and development of a non-invasive spectral diagnosis system (Figure 1) for the early detection of melanoma. The system uses spectroscopic techniques to collect diffuse reflectance and fluorescence from tissue. Analysis of this data can yield important information such as oxygen saturation of the blood, concentration of hemoglobin and the optical properties of the tissue being sampled. This data can be used to identify the extent of angiogenesis and thus classify patients into different stages of cancer growth. The entire process of collecting the data takes less than a second. I am also studying light transport inside different tissue geometries using Monte Carlo simulations (Figure 2). These studies will help explain the variations in the spectra obtained from tissue at different stages of cancer.

Figure 1. Clinical spectral diagnosis system (left) and optical fiber probe (right) for the detection of skin cancers.

Figure 2. Monte Carlo modeling of light propagation in tissue.