A new collaboration, funded by the NIH, brings together the expertise of Professor Maria Helguera (Center for Imaging Sciences, RIT), Professor Diane Dalecki (BME, UR), and Professor Denise Hocking (Pharmacology & Physiology, UR). The collaborative effort focuses on developing novel, ultrasound tissue characterization techniques for engineered tissues. This work is part of a larger project, led by Drs. Dalecki and Hocking and funded by the NIH, that aims to develop ultrasound-based technologies for the field of tissue engineering.

Dr. Helguera's laboratory is devoted to advancing multimodal imaging and materials characterization techniques. Over the years, she has developed a suite of nondestructive, ultrasound-based materials characterization techniques for non-biological materials, such as polymers, ceramics, and layered materials. Through this new collaborative effort, the novel approaches that Dr. Helguera has developed and implemented for ultrasound characterization of non-biological materials will be translated to characterize the biological properties of engineered tissues. We propose to extend and apply high frequency ultrasound-based, tissue characterization techniques to monitor non-invasively biological and structural properties of cells and extracellular matrix proteins within three-dimensional engineered tissues. NIH support for the next two years will allow Dr. Helguera to spend the fall semesters and part of her summers devoted full-time to the research project as a Visiting Scientist in the Dalecki lab at the UR BME department. Drs. Helguera, Dalecki, and Hocking are all members of the Rochester Center for Biomedical Ultrasound.