Title
of presentation: Acoustofluidics in Cancer Diagnostics
Abstract:
At present, about one person dies from cancer every three minutes in the UK. There is an urgent clinical need of diagnosing cancer at an early stage, where it isn’t too large and hasn’t spread, and is more likely to be treated effectively and allows higher chances of surviving. The proposed solution will realise early cancer diagnosis and provide overall estimation of tumour characteristics with multiple snapshot of tumour biomarkers to support cancer management decisions and  monitoring of cancer. Acoustic separation of tumour biomarkers from body fluids for cancer early diagnosis is proposed. The separated tumour biomarkers can act as a surrogate for cancer progressions and treatment response, and a predictor of overall survival rate. The proposed solution will offer specificity, efficiency, scalability and less invasive for cancer diagnostics. The technology will aid in treatment selection, monitoring cancer drug resistance and tumour evolution, screening recurrence, identifying residual lesion, detecting cancers in nascent phases, and informing prognoses. The acoustic detection of tumour biomarkers can pick up variance in tumour genetics well before imaging modalities reveal changes in growth. 

Short bio:

Xin Yang is lecturer of Medical Engineering and director of Medical Ultrasound and Sensors Laboratory (MUSL) at the school of Engineering, Cardiff University, and adjunct professor at Lanzhou Jiaotong University, China. He studies Biomedical Engineering at Beijing Jiaotong University from 2001 – 2005. He was awarded the
MSc in Medical Electronics & Physics in Queen Mary, University of London in 2006. He worked as the CEO and CTO for two years in Beijing BJ Device Ltd. He was awarded PhD in 2011 for work in Doppler ultrasound in quantifying neovascularisation. He was the British Heart Foundation (BHF) research fellow working at Doppler ultrasound phantoms and wall shear stress measurement at the
Queen's Medical Research Institute, The University of Edinburgh. He started his current position in Cardiff University since 2013 and was awarded his EPSRC First Grant in 2016. He has published refereed journal papers on Doppler ultrasound and is principal author of 8 books in the subject of electronics and microcontrollers. He is directing the MUSL with the main focus of engineering applications in cancer. Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) are the biomarker of cancer progression and surrogate for dynamic cancer diagnosis and  monitoring treatment responses. The MUSL is working on the development of acoustic transducers applying surface acoustic waves to separate CTCs from whole blood, with the microwave  characterisation as the downstream analysis. His work is realising liquid biopsy in cancer management to allow real-time snapshot the
insight of tumour development.