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Sensing and imaging research center lands $16.2 million grant

By David J. Craig

Objects buried underground, underwater, or embedded in living tissue soon will be more accesible to the probing eyes of scientists than ever before, as a result of technologies developed by a new multi-institutional research effort involving several BU faculty members.

Six academic and research institutions and two teaching hospitals will collaborate with industrial partners as part of the Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS), which is supported by a five year, $16.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

"The research could result in advances in a new generation of medical imaging for better and less invasive diagnosing of cancer and heart disease, and methods to improve in vitro fertilization and to detect underground pollution or hidden highway bridge damage," says CenSSIS Director Michael Silevitch, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University.

A primary goal of the center is to create a "unified framework for understanding subsurface sensing systems," according to Professor Bahaa E. A. Saleh, chairman of ENG’s electrical and computer engineering department and CenSSIS deputy director.

"No matter what the scale of the objects we try to identify, whether they be large archaeological objects or microscopic cells – and whether the sensors utilize light waves or sound waves – the physics and mathematics that form the basis of these technologies are very similar," Saleh says. "But in the past, researchers working on subsurface sensing in different areas have gone their own ways and haven’t communicated well. This is going to bring everybody together to share our experience and tools."

Northeastern University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez are collaborating with BU on CenSSIS, as are researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

CenSSIS will also establish design competitions and preengineering programs for middle and high school students, sensing and imaging laboratories for undergraduates at the four academic institutions contributing to the center, research internships in industry, and interdisciplinary, team-taught courses that focus on how engineering work is applied in the real world.

Michael Ruane, an ENG associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, will direct the CenSSIS educational effort at BU, which should include a new internship program where students continue to be paid by an industrial partner for research done at BU even after their on-site work is complete.

CenSSIS will have "a major impact on education at BU for a long time," according to Saleh. "One complaint nationally about engineering education is that it is too abstract and students don’t learn how the tools they create fit into the larger system in which they’re used. But through the internships and the undergraduate lab work in sensing and imaging, the center will help students understand the practical applications of their work at a very early stage, and it will show them the role engineering plays in society."

BU’s main contributions to the center’s research will be in the areas of acoustics and ultrasonic imaging, photonics, and signal processing.

Ronald Roy, an ENG associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, will lead a team of researchers in developing new, highly effective sensors that use sound waves to detect objects beneath a variety of surfaces, based on his pioneering work in acoustics and ultrasonic imaging.

Also working to develop new subsurface sensors will be a group of researchers under the direction of Saleh. With Malvin Teich, an ENG professor of electrical and computer engineering, Saleh holds a patent for a speculative new form of microscopy, called entangled-photon fluorescence
microscopy. The technology allows scientists to look deeper into human tissue at a finer resolution than traditional microscopes can, while causing less damage to living cells. Also active on the project is Alexander Sergienko, an ENG professor of electrical and computer engineering.

"Boston University’s expertise in acoustics and photonics provides a promising array of approaches for the development of new sensors for use in a variety of subsurface environments," says Saleh. "We also have researchers here with expertise in extracting information from blurred and noisy data. That is vital to interpreting data collected by the sensors, so the structure of the imaged objects can be clearly seen."

David Castanon, an ENG associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, will lead the effort to process data gathered by the subsurface sensors.

Under the terms of the National Science Foundation grant, the four academic institutions will provide matching funds of about $16 million over the grant period. With additional support from industry partners and the commonwealth of Massachusetts, the center’s annual budget is expected to be $8 million. About 25 biomedical, engineering, and hi-tech firms, including Raytheon and Mercury Computers, have indicated an interest in partnering with CenSSIS, according to Saleh.

The center will be able to apply for another five-year grant at the end of the first grant period, and subsequently is expected to be self-sustaining with support from its industry partners.

CenSSIS will fund work at Northeastern involving sensing technologies using electromagnetic waves, which may lead to new methods of detecting land mines; research on the compression and real-time transmission of complex images over the Internet, at Rensselaer; and methods for imaging coral reefs (to track erosion) and the flow of pollutants from rivers into the ocean, at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.

Saleh says the collaborations fostered by CenSSIS will help bring his own invention closer to commercialization. "Our microscopy technology hasn’t been tested in a real-life setting yet," he says, "and having access to the hospitals that are participating in the project could get us to that stage soon.

"Another advantage is that our group does not have the expertise to develop the special computer programs necessary to extract useful information from what our microscope reads," he continues. "Other partners in the center will provide that."

6 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations