EE PhD Student wins People's Choice Award at 3 Minute Thesis Competition

Timo presenting his research

Congratulations to Timo Lauteslager who won the People's Choice Award at the recent College run Thesis Competition.

Timo presented his work on ‘Functional neuroimaging using impulse radar’ which is supervised by Dr Tim Constandinou from the Centre for Bio-Inspired Technology, Circuits and Systems group.

Imperial College’s Graduate School organises an annual 3 Minute Thesis competition (3MT®), a research communication competition developed by the University of Queensland.  The exercise challenges PhD students to present their thesis topic and its significance in just three minutes in language appropriate to a non-specialist audience. Students are allowed a single static PowerPoint slide to accompany their presentation.  Departments submit two entrants to the Graduate school, and this year there were 19 entrants.

Congratulations to Timo, he receives £250 for this Award.

Timo’s research is looking at functional neuroimaging. A new technique that has lately received a lot of attention in the biomedical field, is microwave imaging. Electromagnetic pulses at microwave frequencies can propagate through tissues such as the skin and the skull, but are harmless for humans. Because brain tissue and blood have different dielectric properties, a volume of blood in the brain causes reflections of these electromagnetic pulses, which can be detected using an array of antennas. Using radar techniques, we want to detect local changes in blood volume, which are an indicator for brain activity. This would allow for functional neuroimaging, which is incredibly important for diagnosis of diseases, future therapies, and for our understanding of the brain.

In the current project we are investigating the possibilities of using an ultra-wideband (UWB) radar for functional neuroimaging. Because of a new design of a radar on a chip, we should be able to detect brain activity in an imaging device the size of a helmet. A device this small would be portable and much less expensive compared to alternative imaging methods (such as fMRI), hopefully making functional neuroimaging more accessible to researchers and clinicians worldwide.