Dr. Vivek Krishna Nagarajan

I have been interested in studying the light-matter interaction and its potential uses for medical diagnostics for the past few years. My journey began during the penultimate year of my undergraduate program, wherein, we (team of 3) developed a cost-effective (<$20) hand-held system for assessment of dermatological treatments (mainly based on the redness of skin). The device lacked sensitivity (light dependent resistors were insensitive to skin-color changes), however, we marginally (~10%) improved the signal with a minor modification to the device (that amplified the light signal).

For my senior design project (at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Kharagpur), we (team of 2) developed an efficient (~93% accuracy) image processing algorithm to extract small vessels from digital retinal images. This work was published and it currently has over 50 citations.

For my master's thesis, I had developed a cost-effective (<$200) fluorescence-assisted cell count device. A patent application has been filed on the optical design and the final device. The device successfully detected fluorescence signal from a portable cell-culture system, thereby, establishing a portable cell-based sensing platform.

For my doctoral work, I'm currently working on developing a fiber-optic spectroscopic system to continuously monitor the changes tissue optical properties during ablation. In additional to measuring the tissue optical properties continuously, an effort is being made to relate the optical properties to the true tissue damage. At the end of this project, we hope to have realized an optical system for continuously monitoring thermal tissue damage during ablation procedures for use in a clinical setting.

In the future, I plan to continue designing and developing device for non-invasive medical diagnostics. I'm especially interested in medical applications of OCT (optical coherence tomography) and non-invasive glucose and cancer diagnostics.