Optical Cancer Imaging Lab

Screening, Diagnosis, and Therapy with Light

Category: Graduation

Academic Excellence at OCIL

Recent OCIL graduate Dr. Jeanie Malone was awarded the UBC Applied Science Dean’s Academic Excellent award, an honour given to the top graduate student across all fields in Applied Science who demonstrates strong academic and research track record, and has made significant contributions to their chosen field of study.

Dr. Malone holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and a BASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia. During her doctoral studies, she investigated the application of these technologies in tubo-ovarian, cervical, oral, and lung cancers, as well as lung transplantation.

Congratulations Dr. Malone!

May 30, 2025
Congratulations Dr. Malone!
Congratulations to Dr. Jeanie Malone for successfully defending her PhD thesis!

Jeanie’s work ‘Towards endoscopic optical imaging of the fallopian tubes for tubo-ovarian cancer detection‘ explored the use of optical imaging catheters for cancer detection and management. Her work focused on detecting the earliest ovarian cancers where they form in the fallopian tubes. She demonstrated these devices can distinguish disease from normal tissue – the first step towards developing screening tools for ovarian cancer detection.

Select Publications:

Multipath artifacts enable angular contrast in multimodal Multimodal Optical Imaging of Ex Vivo Fallopian Tubes to Distinguish Early and Occult Tubo-Ovarian Cancers
Multipath artifacts enable angular contrast in multimodal endoscopic optical coherence tomography
Imaging Biomarkers of Oral Dysplasia and Carcinoma Measured with In Vivo Endoscopic Optical Coherence Tomography
December 9, 2024
Congratulations Dr. Tanskanen!
Congratulations to Dr. Adrian Tanskanen who successfully defended his PhD thesis!

Adrian’s work ‘Leveraging Multipath Effects in Multimodal Optical Coherence Tomography for Cancer Detection‘ described methods to characterize, mitigate and leverage multipath artifacts inherent to OCT systems using double-clad fiber.

Select Publications:
September 26, 2024
Congratulations Mehar & Allan!

Attenuation coefficient of normal (left) and pathologic (right) oral tissue.

A segmented airway and example cross-sections (segmentations in green).

Congratulations to Mehar and Allan who successfully defended their undergraduate honours theses this fall!

Mehar’s work ‘Methods for the Estimation of Depth-resolved Attenuation in OCT‘ compared different approaches for calculating the attenuation coefficient from OCT data. This allows us to characterize optical properties of tissue as they change with respect to depth.

Allan developed an automated tool to segment the tissue surface in OCT of the small airways of the lung. This tool allow us to quantify image features in the small airways without requiring manual segmentation. You can read his thesis, ‘Lumen Segmentation in Endobronchial Optical Coherence Tomography with Deep Learning‘ online.

December 18, 2023
Congratulations Chloe!

Chloe successfully defended her Master’s thesis ‘Segmentation of Oral Optical Coherence Tomography with Deep Learning‘ with no revisions, the highest level of pass at Simon Fraser University’s School of Engineering Science.

Chloe developed a four-part neural network pipeline to aid OCT interpretation by providing en face maps of epithelial depth. This allows for rapid identification of the most pathologic region in endoscopic OCT of the oral cavity, which may help identify the best site for biopsy. Chloe’s pipeline demonstrates as-good-as or better agreement than manual assessment between two raters, suggesting strong performance. Further work includes validating this tool on data acquired with a different OCT system to test generalizability.

August 17, 2023