Pegah Eslami

Position: Ph.D Student in Biophotonics, Université Laval, Québec, Canada

Academia:
Master’s degree in Photonics, Shahid Beheshti University, Teheran, Iran
Bachelor’s degree in Laser and Optical Engineering, Bonab University, Iran

Advisor: Prof. Daniel Côté

Email: pegah.eslami.1@ulaval.ca

Neurosurgical Guidance Using Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy

DBS (Deep brain stimulation) has become a safe and effective for treatment of the neurological movement disorders such as those happen in Parkinson’s disease (PD). During DBS, implanted electrodes are used into specific targets such as the subthalamic nucleus (STN). Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (DRS) has been used to study biological tissue in many applications and can be used as a non-invasive technique to analyze a given material’s reflectance spectrum characteristics produced as light passed through a medium.
This technique takes advantage of the brain’s white and grey matter different reflectivity near STN. It is usually performed by using a broadband white light source, some sort of optic probe for delivering the light to and from the instruments, and spectral analysis is done by a spectrometer. Spectroscopy in the brain tissue can also provide information due to blood content based on the strong absorbers in blood (deoxygenated and oxygenated hemoglobin).

Biography

Since laser and optics have numerous applications in several fields of engineering and medicine, Pegah found this field very interesting; hence, she started her undergraduate studies in Laser and Optical Engineering at Bonab University (2011-2015). She obtained her MSc in Photonics from Shahid Beheshti University (2017-2020). She has collaborated with some professors and graduate students in Photonics research. During her master’s, she worked on biophysics and photonics aspects such as using plasma physics on Diabetes for in vitro and in vivo. She always had an insatiable appetite for medical applications, and photonics has a great capacity to incorporate laser and optical concepts into medicine. Moreover, she had participated in several workshops, which made her interested in the Biophotonics field of research. As a Ph.D. student in DCCLab, she is working on guiding DBS (Deep brain stimulation) using DRS (diffuse reflectance spectroscopy).