Our faculty member is trying to develop a portable MRI machine that can be taken home: Yannis Yortsos, USC Viterbi School of Engg.

Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld, spoke to Yannis Yortsos, the Dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering (VSE), University of Southern California, to know more about the prospects and possibilities of technlogical innovations in medical research at VSE that can jumpstart life-saving treatments.

Engg. and technology impacting Medicine

Engineering and technology are revolutionizing medicine in many ways. If you look at what medicine is, it is in many different ways: diagnosis, surgery, wellness, and pharmaceuticals. And in all of these areas, technology plays an increasingly important role. In the area of diagnosis, which is essentially information science, understanding what's wrong. The way in which technology—perhaps AI, machine learning, the ability to monitor various signals in the body through wearables, and many other things—is making the prediction of what's going on and understanding of the current state of the health of an individual so much easier.

Engg. and technology impacting Medicine at Viterbi School of Engineering, USC examples

At the USC Institute of Creative Technologies, we have a professor by the name of Leslie Saxon who is very much engaged in the wearable technology that allows you to measure critical functions of your body. And that is information that you can pass onto your doctor, potentially on an instantaneous basis, to understand where we are with respect to this development. One of our faculty members is trying to develop a portable MRI machine that can be taken home, for example, and then you can do MRIs in a way that doesn't require this very sophisticated MRI technology. A lot of the things that have become personalized, portable, and precise are actually aspects of medicine in many different ways.

Advanced technology could provide a tremendous speed in computation and the ability to detect things at a much higher resolution than before. Another example I can give you from work that happened at USC is in the area of liquid biopsies, in which, by drawing blood, you can understand whether there is the potential for cancer because they can detect cancer cells at very, very low concentrations. And people can say that there's something in there to which we have to pay attention and, therefore, be able to avoid unnecessary complications in the future. We have a faculty member, Maryam Shanechi, who is trying to understand brain signals without a lot of invasive penetration, for example, to understand mood disorders, anxiety, and depression, which is actually a brand-new area, and that's another place that you can potentially do intervention without actual pharmaceuticals.

I cannot proceed without making mention of one of our faculty members, Mark Humayun, who has developed the artificial retina. This is for people who suffer from macular degeneration and therefore cannot see anymore. Mark is a biomedical engineer and an eye surgeon at the same time. He developed an electronic, essentially retina. So that stimulates the optical nerve and plays the role of an artificial retina that allows people who are blind to actually see. This is like a biblical type of accomplishment if you think about it, and if we can do this, we can do so many other things, from routine things like knee replacements to many other complex things as well.

Viterbi School of Engineering, USC: Research

When I look at the engineering department at USC, because that's my area of supervision, we work in research that comprises four different buckets. One is, let's say, sustainability. The other is health. The third is cybersecurity, among others. The fourth is enriching life, how do you make life enriching. I will focus a little bit on the health side because that is the conversation that we have. Imagine a world in which we live without illness. Imagine a world that everybody's health is pretty much good, throughout their life, and then something happens and of course, we cannot live forever so, something will happen. But imagine a life without suffering; I think that's very important. And I think technology will take us to the point where we'll be able to live a life of this type. At USC, we have a Biomedical Engineering department, which very recently received a big naming gift of 35 million dollars from the Alfred Mann Foundation. It’s called the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering, and it will allow the School of Engineering to closely partner with the School of Medicine, the School of Pharmacy, the School of Dentistry, and the School of Gerontology. USC has a unique School of Gerontology, which talks about ageing, and ageing is part of essentially the conversation I had before.

Ageing is an important part of medicine in many different ways- because the body has a way to send signals when things live longer than a certain period of time. Understanding this and how to extend that lifespan is actually an important part as well. So, we are on the cusp of a tremendous revolution in medicine. And all this is driven by the exponential technology gains. And you can see this is how they move, whether it's computing, whether it's new machines, new technologies, understanding nature in many different ways, biology, or the discovery of pharmaceuticals, which is going to be very much accelerated with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Viterbi School of Engineering,USC: Partnering with India

At USC, we have a number of pillars that drive our Engineering School. One is talent; the other is educational programming. The third is thought leadership. And the fourth is impact, innovation, and relevance. The most important common denominator in all this is talent. Indian students are by far one of the most talented students in the world, specifically the students, I wouldn't say only the students who come to USC but certainly many of them are very talented. By coming to USC and being educated, I think they can offer tremendous opportunities for advancing all kinds of different parts of technology, but also medicine as well.

A number of our students are in biomedical engineering, and then they specialise in medicine. Moving forward, we have a number of startup companies that are actually driven by Indian students who are actually working in the area of biomedical engineering. And when I talk about biomedical engineering, the boundaries between medicine and biomedical engineering are becoming less and less distinct, more and more diffuse, and they're not sharp; they're not silos anymore.

We have a partnership at the undergraduate level with a number of entities. There is an Indo-US entity that supports sending students from India to the USA, as well as a couple of other institutions. These are very top-notch undergraduate students. They come here for the summer to USC, and then they partner with and do research with our faculty. These are very talented kids, and ultimately they go to graduate school. We have two examples of kids who went through our program, and now they're professors at USC. They stayed after that.

A number of our faculty have individual relationships and partnerships here in India. I should mention IISc, the Indian Institute of Sciences, here; we have a strong partnership with them. In fact, one of our faculty members, Murali Annavaram, is here this year for sabbatical, and conversely, we have faculty that are visiting our institutions. In the past, we had a strong partnership with the Birla Institute of Technology to be able to take joint courses between undergraduates in engineering and undergraduates at BITS, Pilani, which was the Birla Institute of Science and Technology, a private school of high quality. And we're always looking for situations in which we can expand in a mutually beneficial way, on both sides.