Wash U professor receives $2.5 million grant for new x-ray concept

A professor at Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Engineering & Applied Science has been given two grants by the National Institutes of Health to create a new biomedical imaging approach.

Mark Anastasio, a biomedical engineering professor, will use the grants, which are combined worth $2.5 million, to build a new x-ray technique that will help engineers develop new bioengineered tissues.

“We are developing a new imaging technology based on phase-contrast x-ray imaging,” Anastasio said in a statement. “It will serve as an enabling technology for tissue engineering studies.”

The new technology won’t rely on the absorption of x-ray energy. Instead, it will exploit wave optic effects, which will provide scientists better identify implanted biomaterials, some of which are tested in small animals.

The NIH grant will fund the development of algorithms and software required for the new imaging technology.

“In some cases, you can make the x-ray beam act like a wave,” Anastasio said. “In such cases, when it hits an interface between two tissues, it can actually bend by a very small angle; it can refract. If you can measure the angle by which these rays refract, you can form a more detailed image based on that information. It will let you see things that would normally be invisible to conventional x-ray imaging.”