PHIND Seminar Series - Daniel Heywood, PhD Candidate

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.