Dr Elahe Moghimirad is a postdoc in the Imaging for Radiotherapy Adaptation Team and is exploring novel methods of 3D contrast enhanced imaging for pre-clinical and clinical assessment of tumour response to radiotherapy.
Ultrasound characterisation of the tumor vasculature using dynamic contrast enhanced ultrasound (DCE-US) has been shown to be a useful tool in the measurement of tumour response to anti-angiogenic therapies and chemotherapy. Our hypothesis is that by DCE-US may also be used to measure tumour response to radiotherapy and help predict treatment outcome within the first few days of therapy.
Elahe is developing new methods of 3D DCE-US acquisition on which will allow us to image the heterogeneous response to therapy within a tumour. She is focused on reliable and reproducible measurement of DCE-US imaging biomarkers derived from analysis of 3D contrast dynamics. Elahe will optimize the 3D image acquisition and develop appropriate models for fitting time-intensity data derived from 3D images.
This work contributes to a larger programme of work that develops a 3D multi-parametric ultrasound (mpUS) imaging system funded by Cancer Research UK.
Dr Moghimirad joined the ICR after receiving her PhD degree from Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran in biomedical engineering, majoring in ultrasound imaging. She worked on Fourier beam formation during her PhD, one year of which has been held in the Technical University of Denmark Center for Fast Ultrasound Imaging, as a research visitor. She has also worked on signal and image processing as a R&D engineer from 2008-11. Her research interests include biomedical signal and image processing, array signal processing, and ultrasound imaging.
This work is funded by Cancer Research UK Programme Foundation Award C20892/A23557.