Dr. Joshua Deal

I was recruited into the field of basic medical science to apply my knowledge and expertise in mathematics and statistics to biological problems. To that end, I joined a lab with an engineering oriented focus and began developing, improving, and applying a new technique called excitation-scanning hyperspectral imaging. This technique uses the behavior of light's unique response to objects to classify various materials and draw distinctions between them. For example, we are currently investigating the usefulness of excitation-scanning hyperspectral imaging in determination of disease states by classifying resected colon tissue into lesional and non-lesional segments. This research requires knowledge of optical pathways and components, basic scripting/programming to control the equipment, image processing techniques to combine the various images into a meaningful data set, and various types of data analysis techniques to interpret the data in a meaningful way.