Dr Adrien Desjardins

UCL Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer

Dr Adrien Desjardins is a Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. He obtained his PhD from Harvard and from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Programme. Prior to joining UCL, he was a Senior Scientist at Philips Research in the Minimally Invasive Healthcare Department. He leads a translational research programme that is centred on the development of medical devices and medical imaging platforms for guiding minimally invasive procedures. He has particular interests in optical, ultrasound, and photoacoustic imaging to provide real-time information about tissue morphology and molecular composition. He is the recipient of Starting Grants from the European Research Council and the EPSRC.

GIFT-Surg focus

Imaging plays a central role in fetal surgery. Conventionally, our views of the placenta and the fetus from inside the uterus have been limited to white-light endoscopy. This modality provides a superficial view of tissue, without quantitative information about blood flow. One resulting limitation is that subsurface vessels, which can be of significant interest in procedures such as twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), are largely invisible. During fetal surgery, our views of the uterine environment from outside the body have been limited to ultrasound imaging, which has insufficient spatial resolution for many clinical contexts, and it does not directly provide information about the molecular composition of tissue. Miniature photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging probes that can be inserted into the uterine environment could dramatically enhance our ability to visualise the placenta and fetus. They will provide depth-resolved images, so that subsurface structures such as blood vessels can be directly visualised. Photoacoustic imaging probes will involve the delivery of pulsed light to tissue to generate ultrasound waves, and the use of optical interferometry for reception. Ultrasound images will also be obtained with optical methods, which will include engineered nano-composite materials that transmit ultrasound when illuminated by pulsed light. These imaging probes will provide views of the placenta and fetus that are significantly higher in spatial resolution than those obtained from outside the body, and molecular specificity to provide contrast for blood oxygenation.

Visualisation of medical devices within the body is an important challenge in interventional procedures. Medical devices often stray from the ultrasound imaging plane, and the resulting uncertainties about their locations can increase the risk of complications and decrease procedural efficiency. Ultrasonic device tracking is a method for localising medical devices within the body that will be developed for fetal interventions. This method involves receiving ultrasound pulses from an external imaging probe using fibre optic ultrasound receivers, and processing the received pulses in a manner analogous to GPS tracking. With the information provided by ultrasonic device tracking, high-resolution photoacoustic and ultrasound images acquired from inside the uterus will be aligned in real-time to the large-scale ultrasound images acquired from outside the patient.

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