SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has awarded the prestigious SPIE-Franz Hillenkamp Postdoctoral Fellowship in Problem-Driven Biomedical Optics and Analytics to Morgan Fogarty, a graduate student at WashU Medicine. The fellowship, worth $75,000, will support Fogarty's postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Joseph Culver, the Sherwood Moore Professor of Radiology for WashU Medicine Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, where Fogarty is finishing her PhD.
Fogarty uses an imaging method called diffuse optical tomography (DOT) to monitor language function and recovery in post-stroke patients with aphasia (language loss). DOT is a noninvasive technique that measures how near-infrared frequencies of light interact with biological material to detect differences in tissue density, blood volume or other tissue anomalies. Fogarty has helped develop a very-high-density diffuse optical tomography system that collects 10,000 such measurements, more than twice as many as current high-density DOT systems do.
Fogarty said she hopes to expand on DOT mapping and characterization studies conducted during her doctoral studies for her postdoctoral research, developing the technology into clinical tools to aid in the recovery of post-stroke patients with aphasia.
