Welcome everybody.

We have another speaker today and you can see that I'm not in my home office as usually,

but I'm here actually on the campus and we're doing a hybrid event today.

So this is quite exciting to bring the online and offline worlds together.

There may be one or two problems here, but I think we will be able to compete with them.

And you see here that we have a speaker today, and this is Jesse Jokerst.

He has completed his bachelor's at Truman State University and after a PhD in chemistry

at UT Austin with John McDevitt, he completed a postdoc with Sam Gambier in Stanford Radiology.

Now as an associate professor in the Department of Nanoengineering at UC San Diego, the Jokerst

group is eager to collaborate on projects broadly related to human health and nanotechnology.

In the talk today entitled Focal Acoustic Imaging in Medicine, Jesse Jokerst will present

ongoing research at this lab on innovative non-invasive imaging technology.

So it's a great pleasure to have Jesse here.

Just have to check that I'm not always looking over to him because he's actually in the same

room.

But it's really great to have you here and I'm very much looking forward to your talk

and the stage is yours.

Thank you so much and thank you for the invitation.

Yeah, this is my first in-person talk since the pandemic.

So what a treat.

Thanks to Daniel Stromer for organizing and for the invitation.

So sorry for starting late, but I'm going to just dive right in and tell you some of

the themes of my group.

So we're broadly focused on imaging, primarily ultrasound imaging, acoustic imaging, and

photoacoustic imaging and some of the hybrids.

So as Andrea said in the introduction, I'm a chemist by training and so a large focus

in the group is actually on contrast agents and contrast media, particularly those that

are based on a nanoparticle formulation.

And so I'm not going to talk a lot about that today.

Here are some of the papers that the group has done over the years using different nanoparticle

formulations for imaging.

But given the spirit of the institution and the real strengths of this institution in

imaging, I wanted to talk about three translational projects that are underway in the lab.

So all three of these are grouped broadly under the umbrella of photoacoustic ultrasound.

So first, I know a lot of you are familiar with photoacoustic ultrasound, but for those

of you who aren't, I want to talk briefly about how the technology works and some of

its strengths and limitations.

And then I'm going to go through three case studies.

The first is therapeutic drug monitoring for heparin, which is an anticoagulant.

The second is in the area of oral health, so monitoring diseases in the mouth of the

gingiva.

And then the third, the one that brought me here, is in wound care and using photoacoustics

to monitor and predict response to therapy for chronic wounds.

So the technique that we're describing today is photoacoustic ultrasound.

The simplest explanation is that it's a light in, sound out technique.

And so traditional ultrasound, we have a transducer that's emitting and receiving ultrasound waves.

And so these ultrasound waves are echoing basically the reflected and reflected off

of tissue.

And as those move back to the transducer, that's what creates an image.

In photoacoustics, it's light in, sound out.