2019 News Archive

Fernando Zvietcovich Successfully Defends his PhD Thesis

December 12, 2019

Congratulations to Fernando Zvietcovich who successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Dynamic Optical Coherence Elastography.”  Fernando's public defense took place on Thursday, December 12, 2019, immediately followed by a closed-door defense session.  Fernando has been supervised by Professor Kevin Parker and co-supervised by Professor Jannick Rolland in the Institute of Optics.  His PhD committee was chaired by Professor Mark Buckley (Biomedical Engineering), and included Professor Gonzalo Mateos (Electrical & Computer Engineering).  Again, congratulations to Fernando and many thanks for his hard work and significant contributions to Professor Parker's Medial Imaging Research Group.  We wish him all the best in his postdoctoral research position in Dr. Kirill Larin's Biomedical Optics Laboratory at the University of Houston.

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2020 SPIE-Franz Hillenkamp Postdoctoral Fellowship Awarded to Fernando Zvietcovich

November 25, 2019

PhD candidate Fernando Zvietcovich, supervised by Prof. Kevin Parker, is the winner of the 2020 SPIE-Franz Hillenkamp Postdoctoral Fellowship in Problem-Driven Biomedical Optics and Analytics. The annual award of $75,000 supports interdisciplinary problem-driven research and provides opportunities for translating new technologies into clinical practice for improving human health. Fernando, who is co-advised by Prof. Jannick Rolland (UR Institute of Optics), will work on translating a novel biophotonics-based optical coherence elastography (OCE) method, developed and designed for the non-invasive quantification of corneal spatial biomechanical properties in 3D, into in vivo clinical use for diagnosing and monitoring the treatment for human ocular disease. Congratulations to Fernando for receiving this prestigious award! More information can be found here.

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The 3D Spatial Autocorrelation of the Branching Fractal Vasculature

April 9, 2019

A paper authored by Professor Kevin Parker and collaborators Dr. Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback (UR Department of Physics and Astronomy) and Dr. Ronald Wood (URMC Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology) titled "The 3D spatial autocorrelation of the branching fractal vasculature" has been published by Acoustics.  The article appears in a special issue, "Acoustics in Biomedical Engineering," and can be found here.

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Shear wave propagation in viscoelastic media: validation of an approximate forward model

January 8, 2019

A paper co-authored by graduate student Fernando Zvietcovich and Professor Kevin Parker, and collaborators Professor Natalie Baddour (University of Ottawa) and Professor Jannick Rolland (UR Institute of Optics) titled "Shear wave propagation in viscoelastic media: validation of an approximate forward model" has been published by Physics in Medicine and Biology, and can be found here. The work described in the article reconsiders a previous analytical model with the goal of obtaining a computationally straightforward and efficient equation for the propagation of shear waves from a focal push pulse. This model is compared with an experimental OCT system and with finite element models. The results support the use of an efficient form of the Hankel transform for both lossless (elastic) and lossy (viscoelastic) media, and for both impulsive and extended push pulses that can model a range of experimental conditions.

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