Yijing Xie awarded Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship

Yijing has been awarded the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship for her research in the development of tools to help neurosurgeons during surgery.

Dr Xie says that currently there is a lack of effective ways to assess brain functions in real-time, particularly during brain surgery. During such a procedure, the surgeon must remove all cancerous tissue while preserving surrounding brain tissue and regions that serve important functions.

The current ‘gold standard’ is to perform functional brain mapping while the patient is awake and performing a specific task, but even a highly experienced surgeon using the latest surgical technologies will experience difficulties including prolonged surgery time and higher patient risk.

Dr Xie is looking into multi-spectral imaging which current evidence suggests that it can detect tumor fluorescence quantitatively while also revealing brain functions. But as this is currently implemented in 2D, Dr Xie will develop a compact 3D multispectral optical imaging platform that is specialized for use in the surgical environment.

At the end of the research programme, she will aim to have a working prototype with validated performance ready for onward translation to surgical testing.

Dr Xie says the technology will be highly targeted and will also be scalable and transferable to benefit many other research fields presenting similar challenges, within and beyond biomedical research.

More information here.