Chair for Biological Imaging

(Prof. Dr. Vasilis Ntziachristos)

The Chair for Biological Imaging is a multi-disciplinary bridge between the School of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and the Medical School, involved in the education, research development and propagation of advanced and novel imaging methods to biological, pre-clinical and clinical applications.

Biomedical imaging is seeing unprecedented growth in recent years and it increasingly becomes a keystone in bio-medical studies enabling a new paradigm in biological discovery by bridging the gap between research performed in-vitro and the clinical application. Fueled by key developments in in-vivo reporting on physiology and cellular and sub-cellular function and necessitated by corresponding applications to systems biology, -omics research, pre-clinical studies and their propagation towards molecular medicine, modern imaging approaches go beyond the anatomical or functional imaging of conventional radiological approaches and enable fundamentally new interrogations at the cellular, proteomic and genomic level. As such, modern biomedical imaging is enabling new insights into biological research and accelerates the propagation of new knowledge towards pre-clinical and clinical stages with the goal of improving healthcare and identifying cure faster than ever before.

Carried out at the Institute for Biological and Medical Imaging, this activity plays a central role into engineering necessary technology and work-platforms that enable in-vivo imaging from living biological micro-organisms to humans. With facilities at the TU München (Electrical Engineering and Klinikum Rechts Der Isar) and at the HelmholtzZentrum München campus our academic and research activity further connect basic research and clinical need and serves as an educational unit in imaging technology and application. To achieve these goals, the Chair further integrates highly interdisciplinary skills that bridge mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry, biology and medicine for investing in key focus areas, including:

• Educating a new generation of scientists with multi-disciplinary imaging knowledge,
• Developing new imaging devices and multi-modality systems,
• Advancing imaging and image reconstruction theories and methods,
• Advanced data and image processing methods
• Development of animal models of human disease
• Development of novel imaging applications with focus on in-vivo imaging

Key application areas include the development of new tools for the biomedical laboratory as well as the investigation of imaging methods for diagnostic and disease monitoring and treatment in key areas including cancer, inflammation, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease.

The figure graphically showcases the different fields that may be involved in modern imaging methods, spanning from genomics and proteomics research to cellular imaging, animal imaging, multi-modal tomography and clinical application.