Heechul Yoon was named as a finalist in the student paper competition at the 2017 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, held September 6-9 in Washington, D.C. Yoon is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

Yoon was recognized for his paper entitled “Multispectral Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging: A Versatile Tool Probing Dynamic Phase-Change Contrast Agents,” which he co-wrote with his Ph.D. advisor Stanislav (Stas) Emelianov, who is the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in ECE and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

The paper describes a study that introduces a new biomedical imaging tool that combines an ultrafast ultrasound imaging system and a multi-wavelength laser referred to as multispectral ultrafast ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging to uniquely capture both acoustic and spectral features of a new class of dynamic phase-change nanoagents. The developed approach could be potentially used for various clinical applications, including simultaneous detection and assessment of primary and metastatic cancer.

This research has been conducted in the Ultrasound Imaging and Therapeutics Research Laboratory, which is led by Emelianov and is located in the Molecular Science and Engineering Building on the Georgia Tech campus. In addition to the School of ECE, the lab is affiliated with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and with Emory’s School of Medicine.