PHIND Seminar Series - Daniel Heywood, PhD Candidate

"Thermal Perturbation as a Tool for Noninvasive Impedance Spectroscopy of Blood"

Daniel Heywood, PhD Candidate
Benchmark Stanford Graduate Fellow
PhD Candidate, Mechanical Engineering
Stanford University

Wednesday, July 17th, 2019
James H. Clark Center, S361
11:00am - 12:00pm Seminar & Discussion
12:00pm - 12:15pm Reception & Light Refreshments

ABSTRACT
In this talk we will describe a new technique to specifically measure the electrical impedance spectrum of blood noninvasively, as demonstrated on a vascular tissue phantom. The impedance spectrum of blood in the medium and high frequency RF bands (300 kHz to 30 MHz) has long been known to encode information about erythrocyte state and interaction, due to its sensitivity to cell shape and aggregation. It is also somewhat unusual in that it can be measured without chemical access to the blood. In practice, however, simple approaches to noninvasive measurement face challenges due to the confounding effect of surrounding tissue. We present a potential avenue to overcome this by exploiting the different heat transport mechanisms of flowing blood and stationary tissue as a way to provide contrast.

ABOUT DANIEL HEYWOOD
Daniel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. He works with Prof. Thomas Kenny on techniques combining heat transfer and electrical impedance spectroscopy to investigate biological systems. He received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.