Congratulations to Sapna Bisht for successfully defending her PhD thesis!

Sapna joined the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar in the Dept BioSci Engg IIT Gandhinagar in January 2020. During her PhD studies, Sapna was the recipient of the CIRE Award from the Committee on International Research and Education of the Acoustical Society of America, and Best Student Poster awards at the Symposium on Medical Imaging at IISER Trivandrum, and the PhD Research Showcase at IIT Gandhinagar.

Sapna has worked diligently during her Ph.D. studies. Her work has resulted in meaningful contributions to the literature on ultrasound tissue characterization. She was also involved in other collaborative projects in the lab, which were reported in peer-reviewed publications. She joined the MUSE Lab when we were just getting starting in developing the lab.

We  thank her Doctoral Studies Committee (Profs. Pratik Mutha, Krishna Miyapuram, and Himanshu Shekhar) for their feedback throughout Sapna’s PhD journey. Special thanks to the thesis reviewers, and Prof. Arun Thittai for serving as the external examiner during the defense. We also thank Prof. Uttama Lahiri for serving on the final defense committee.

We are pleased to share that Sapna will be continuing her research in this field through a postdoctoral fellowship in Prof. Kenneth Hoyt‘s group at the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University. We wish her all the best during the next stage of her career!

Congratulations Dr. Sapna Bisht!

Proud of our 2 Master’s graduates from the Medical Ultrasound Engineering (MUSE) Lab at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar ! Congratulations Sakshi Oza and SHASWATA DAS! Wishing them all the best in the next stage of their careers!

Many Congratulations to Sakshi Oza (Biological Sciences and Engineering) and Shaswata Das (Electrical Engineering) for successfully defending their M.Tech. theses!

Sakshi will be joining the Master’s program in Data Science in Health at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the upcoming academic year. All the best to her!

The MUSE Lab participated in the 186th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, from 13th to 17th May 2024 at Ottawa, Canada. Prof. Karla Mercado-Shekhar gave an invited talk on the Certification in Scientific Writing program at IIT Gandhinagar at the “Return of the Writer” special session and co-chaired this session with Prof. Kevin Haworth (University of Cincinnati) and Prof. Julianna Simon (Penn State University). She also gave 2 contributed talks on (1) Dr. Nishita Mistry‘s work on acoustic nanodroplet vaporization and (2) Aaqib Khan‘s work on multi-layered emulsions at the “Droplets Strike Back” special session.

Prof. Karla was also one of the judges for the Biomedical Acoustics Student Best Paper competition. She also met with MUSE Lab alumni, Dr. Anuj Kaushik (now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan) and Hari Nair (now a Ph.D. student at the University of Montreal).

The MUSE Lab had a good showing at the first IEEE South Asian Ultrasonics Symposium (SAUS)  held in our home ground at IIT Gandhinagar with lab members contributing to 8 podium talks and 12 posters, which were selected after double-blind peer review. The talks and posters focused on a range of biomedical ultrasound topics, including shear wave viscoelastography, quantitative ultrasound for tissue characterization, ultrasound-mediated phase-change nanodroplets, image-guided therapy, and development of viscoelastic tissue-mimicking phantoms.

Manu KS and Jagruti Patil also won 1st and 3rd best poster prizes, respectively. Congratulations to our MUSE Lab members! 

Check out our latest work published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA). We report a systematic quantification of differences in shear wave elastography estimates obtained using linear-elastic and viscoelastic material assumptions. This work contributes to advancing the rigor and robustness of shear wave viscoelastography.

This work was performed by Sapna Bisht, a PhD student in the MUSE Lab, and Dr. Abhijit Paul, a former Research Associate, in collaboration with Panchami Patel and Prof. Prachi Thareja from the Soft Matter Rheology Lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar . Many thanks to the support of the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) and GSBTM, DST, GoG.

Check out our article here: https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0025291.

The IIT Gandhinagar-Johns Hopkins University (IITGN-JHU) Collaboration Meeting was held at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar on 4th March 2024. Prof. Nitish Thakor from JHU participated in person and Prof. Amir Manbachi, Ph.D., Avisha Kumar, Max Kerensky, Angelica Lopez, and Denis Routkevitch, participated virtually.

We were also joined in person by Prof. Arun Thittai (IIT Madras), Prof. Hardik Pandya (BEES LAB, IISc Bangalore), and Prof. Biswarup Mukherjee (IIT Delhi), who gave overviews of their labs’ work to identify opportunities for new collaborations in biomedical engineering research and translation across the IITs, IISc, and Johns Hopkins University. A student poster session and tours of the biomedical facilities in the labs of Prof. Uttama Lahiri, Prof. Vineet Vashista, and the MUSE Lab were held.

We thank Prof. Nitish Thakor for supporting this event and his valuable suggestions. We look forward to long-term collaborations!

Glad to have hosted Roshni Kerai for her 3-month dissertation in the MUSE Lab. Roshni is an MSc in Biotechnology student from Shri Alpesh N. Patel Post Graduate Institute of Science and Research affiliated with Sardar Patel University, Anand, Gujarat. Wishing her the best in her future endeavors!

We also welcomed Arjun BS, a PhD scholar from the BEES Lab at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), who was visiting the MUSE Lab for about a week. Arjun works with Prof. Hardik Pandya.

Profs. Karla and Himanshu were Invited Speakers at the Indian Conference on MedTech Innovation (ICMI 2024), held at IIT Jodhpur and AIIMS Jodhpur from 22nd to 24th February 2024. It was great to share work from the MUSE Lab and learn about the progress in medtech in India!

Glad to share our published article in ACS Omega. We reported an approach to tune the viscoelastic properties of PVA phantoms by mixing low- and high-viscosity PVA. In addition, we showed that adding a cryoprotectant to the PVA phantom affected the viscoelastic properties and produced more homogeneous phantoms. The reported work can enable the preparation of homogeneous PVA phantoms with a broad viscoelasticity range for validating ultrasound elastography techniques. This work was done by Sapna Bisht, a PhD student, Bhanu Marri, a former MTech student, and Dr. Jayashree Karmakar, a Research Associate. This work was supported by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), India, and the Gujarat State Biotechnology Mission.

Check out our article here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.3c09224

Happy to share about our recent publication in Communications Medicine (Nature Portfolio) on shear wave elastography for surgical guidance of tethered spinal cord syndrome. The collaborative research was led by the HEPIUS (Holistic Electrical, Ultrasonic, and Physiological Interventions Unburdening Those with Spinal Cord Injury) team at the Johns Hopkins University, USA. The computational work was done in the MUSE Lab at IIT Gandhinagar, and the experimental and clinical work were performed at Johns Hopkins University. The project involved researchers, clinicians, and faculty members from both institutes. It was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Johns Hopkins University in the USA, and the Science Engineering Research Board, India, Gujarat State Biotechnology Mission, and IIT Gandhinagar.

The IITGN research group was spearheaded by Prof. Karla, Prof. Himanshu, and Dr. Abhijit Paul, a former Research Associate who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. Collaborators from Johns Hopkins University included Max Kerensky, Prof Amir Manbachi, Prof Nitish Thakor, and members of the HEPIUS team.

Read more about our research here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-023-00430-6

Dr. Abhijit was also featured in The PostDoc Times at IIT Gandhinagar for his contributions to this work.

Glad to share another published article in ACS Omega from the MUSE lab. This work demonstrates Sonodynamic Therapy using a novel sensitizer in triple-negative breast cancer cells. The work was performed by former postdoctoral fellow Manita Das, Ph.D., who is now at the University of Toronto. This was a collaborative effort with Profs. Iti Gupta and Dhiraj Bhatia at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar . Our future work will focus on extending this work to more realistic geometries (where standing waves are absent) and in preclinical in vivo models. Check out the article here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsomega.3c07445.

Congratulations to Sapna Bisht, a Ph.D student, for receiving the CIRE Award from the Committee for International Research and Education (CIRE) of the Acoustical Society of America! This award provides $1,000 for her research endeavors and a 3-year student membership to Acoustical Society of America.

Abhishek Dharvia, an M.Tech. student in Biological Sciences and Engineering, joins the MUSE Lab. Welcome to the team Abhishek!