Mapping Behavior with Machine Learning
By transforming movement into data, Timothy Dunn is reshaping how scientists can study behavior and the brain.
Enhancing Core BME Research
Biomedical research at Duke began more than a half-century ago with cardiac electrophysiology, biomaterials, and medical ultrasound. As we plan for the future, our community has identified five research areas that are becoming increasingly prominent in the disciplinary landscape. While we have a core cadre of researchers in each of these areas, we will continue to strengthen the talent and resources devoted to these areas to enhance their impact on society.
Complex Biologics
Advanced drug delivery methods, tissue engineering, gene therapies, and systems-level approaches that range from immunological and microbiome applications to cancer-fighting biotechnologies play crucial roles in our vision. We believe that the future of complex biologics lies in the integration of high-throughput, automated, and computational approaches with clinical, human-focused engineering.
Duke BME researchers, led by Nenad Bursac, were among the first to grow beating, fully functional heart tissue in a laboratory setting. Along with others in Duke BME building organ-on-a-chip platforms for vascular and kidney research, this work is now being used to explore potential cures for heart attack damage and rare cardiac genetic diseases.
Digital Health & Medicine
Data is becoming the most valuable, actionable resource to advance and personalize medicine, and Duke BME is at the forefront of leveraging biological, chemical, and physiological data to develop the next generation of computational approaches in pharmaceuticals, health, and medicine.
Building computational digital twins has become a popular method of designing and testing real-world interventions in fields ranging from manufacturing to utility management. While the human body may seem too complex to take the same approach, Duke researchers are showing that it’s possible. Using supercomputer power, Amanda Randles and her collaborators are modeling patient-specific vasculature and blood flow down to the cellular level to help inform complex surgeries and predict disease progression.
Health Disparities
Local and global health disparities present an urgent societal need. We will expand our efforts to meet these health disparities with tools that are continuously re-imagined, redesigned, and retested to operate in specific resource-limited environments. These challenges create opportunities for us to lead and innovate with partners who share that vision.
Duke BME has a wide range of international outreach programs that impact local communities by delivering shelf-stable HIV medications to new mothers, repairing aging medical equipment, and designing low-cost, culture-specific medical devices while training aspiring biomedical engineers to do the same. Another example, Nimmi Ramanujam, works to make cancer diagnosis, prevention, and treatment more accessible and effective for women worldwide.
Neuroengineering
With experts in our department and across the street at Duke University Medical Center, we will build a more cohesive and tighter neuroengineering community, not just at Duke but throughout the field. By creating a more integrated and collaborative research ecosystem, we will exemplify the definition of leading in neuroengineering, driving progress in neuroscience and the translation of discoveries into tangible benefits for human health.
Duke BME researchers are leading a wide range of projects focused on neural health, such as designing and testing next-generation brain-computer interfaces; building new approaches to deep brain and nerve stimulation therapies; and delivering drugs to only specific types of neurons. Cameron McIntyre is the creator of high-resolution, complex augmented reality visualization software that helps researchers and neurosurgeons plan their complex work.
Biomedical Imaging
For over half a century, Duke BME has led the field of biomedical imaging, pioneering the development of impactful clinical technologies. We will continue to advance the frontiers of biomedical imaging science by exploring new imaging physics, creating novel instruments, developing advanced sensors and biomarkers, pioneering computational imaging techniques, and bridging information across scales and modalities to allow for deeper mechanistic studies of biology and disease.
Duke BME researchers pioneered real-time and 3D ultrasound technologies, which are now used in countless clinical settings around the world. And we continue to push the boundaries of biomedical imaging. For example, Roarke Horstmeyer’s lab has developed microscopes that use machine learning to automatically adapt lighting and deploy hundreds of lenses that capture videos of freely moving organisms.
This is an unprecedented view of a mouse placenta as it grows in a live animal, providing researchers with new insights into how the complex organ works—and sometimes fails. It was captured using a technique called photoacoustic tomography: another emerging medical imaging technique that Junjie Yao and Duke colleagues are pushing the boundaries of.
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