By combining ultrasound, photoacoustics, and imaging, Richard Lopata brings medical technologies from concept to clinical practice.
In Richard Lopata's PULSE/e lab, light and sound are combined for innovative diagnostics and treatments. The newly appointed professor, who gives his inaugural lecture on March 20, likes to compare his research group to a band - with himself as the drummer and bandleader. This is more than just a nice metaphor: Lopata is not only a scientist but also a self-taught drummer. "I'm always looking for something I don't know yet."
With a love for vintage techniques and an unconventional way of thinking, Richard Lopata has redefined ultrasound and transformed it into a competitive technology that promises to offer a solution for the overburdened healthcare system. This love for imaging technology is also extensively discussed in his inaugural speech .
"An ultrasound is just a small picture, lots of noise, poor contrast," Richard Lopata explains in his new office in the far corner of Vector. He likes to play music, and here no one is bothered by it. "When I studied here, ultrasound was an old technique, a bit written off. But its simplicity is actually its strength."
'Sampling' from different research areas
Lopata was part of the second cohort of the then brand-new Biomedical Engineering program at TU/e. He jokingly calls the choice for the deliberately broad and interdisciplinary program "a weakness."
"I couldn't choose," he says. With a knack for chemistry, a chemistry degree seemed obvious, but he was also interested in mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, and human biology. He obtained his PhD on a combination of ultrasound, image analysis, and biomechanics, and did his postdoctoral research at Maastricht Medical Center. Now he freely 'samples' from all these fields to develop functional medical applications.
"I'm always looking for something I don't know yet," Lopata says. "And I find it very important to bring together knowledge from multiple domains and go deeper and deeper. Not following trends. That's why the three research lines of my PULS/e group are very strong."
Not trend-sensitive
The aversion to trends was there from a young age. As a child of the '90s, at the height of grunge and with the rise of dance music, Lopata dragged his parents' old record player to his room and played Queen. Later, he would similarly reinvent the underdog of imaging techniques, the 'old-fashioned' ultrasound, within his PULS/e group.
"With 'multi-aperture ultrasound,' we now make ultrasounds with not one, but multiple transducers simultaneously. This allows us to visualize a larger part of the body. In the future, we might even be able to do this automatically, with an ultrasound blanket or belt."
"We actually do three related but totally different things within my group," Richard Lopata explains. "Ultrasound, photoacoustics, and image modeling. And we connect them to create new things."
A major drive to develop accessible medical imaging and analysis is the enormous pressure on healthcare due to aging populations and staff shortages. Lopata sees prevention and early diagnostics as two of the most promising solutions for the pressure on healthcare. And ultrasound can play a crucial role in the latter.
Ultrasound 2.0: wearables and home monitoring
"In addition to high-end ultrasounds, we are increasingly focusing on low-resource ultrasound. Think of wearables and simple scans by general practitioners or even untrained personnel. In the future, even patches might be possible, a kind of stickers, made possible by combinations with micro-machined and flexible ultrasound probes."
It is precisely the simplicity and low cost of ultrasound that offer enormous potential for quickly, painlessly, and large-scale screening of people for heart conditions in our aging society, or the inhabitants of an African village for tuberculosis. "You can't do that with MRI, that costs thousands of euros and takes a lot of time per scan. Ultrasound, on the other hand, costs eighty or ninety euros per scan."
"We are developing ambulatory monitoring based on ultrasound to detect symptoms earlier and better assess which patients should and should not be treated," Lopata explains. By focusing more on early diagnostics, high costs are avoided and patient care improves.
"With enlarged vessels, for example, it's very difficult to estimate which patient will get an unstable aneurysm and who won't. With our renewed ultrasound techniques, we can make prognoses so that we don't overtreat and also miss fewer warning signals from the body."
Lopata's vision is that the cheap and safe ultrasound devices could find a place with every general practitioner or that people could even take them home for monitoring. "We can monitor heart patients while mowing the lawn."
From scan to treatment
By enhancing ultrasound with light, even different tissue types can be distinguished. And the ever-faster development of models makes it possible in the future to create personal, cardiovascular digital twins of patients, trained on their own data.
"With a model based on ultrasound, we can predict the risk of ruptures in blood vessels. That analysis is qualitatively comparable to a CT scan, but the scan is made without harmful radiation and much cheaper. That makes screening more accessible and the measurement can be repeated more often."
The model for monitoring aneurysms (a dangerous dilation of the aorta) is "almost ready" and can be translated into clinical applications. But that doesn't mean Lopata is now sitting still. A fascinating new development he's already working on is ultrasound as a treatment method. Where ultrasound was previously mainly used to see what's wrong in the body, they now want to use it to repair the body.
Sound waves are already being used for treatments, but mainly to destroy tissues, such as cancer cells or kidney stones. With Carlijn Bouten, Richard Lopata is exploring the possibility of treating infarctions in ReAlign.
"We send sound waves into the body and aim them so that the waves run parallel to the fibers in the heart, and the idea is that we could set the new muscle cells in the right direction so that they can perform their function better."
Knowledge of clinical practice
That application of knowledge in a clinical setting is important for Lopata. By improving ultrasound, photoacoustics, and personalized modeling, he wants to bring these advanced technologies from concept to clinical practice, ultimately improving patient care and treatments.
I really want to be able to solve clinical problems and the fascination with the human body has always been there. I want to bridge the gap between innovative research and clinical application.
Richard Lopata
A research track as a musical composition
Drummers are the heartbeat of a band, and that's how Richard Lopata sees himself as the heart of his research group. "But the PhD students are the soloists, the eye-catchers at the front of the stage. The real rock stars."
Lopata is a self-taught drummer, among others in the faculty's ad hoc band of Biomedical Engineering. "I still have to take my first drum lesson." It characterizes him as a scientist and person who follows his passions and teaches himself new things out of curiosity, outside the beaten paths.
"The approach to research in our approach is modular: layer by layer we build from a simple echo a technology that encompasses the entire chain from improved imaging to image interpretation," Lopata says. His great example in this is not a scientist, but a musician: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.
"In Wilson's lab - his studio - the Beach Boys songs were supplemented with the best studio musicians to create a wall-of-sound layer by layer. In various studios, different sections of the song were worked on. Only later did everything come together and form one unique whole."
Mentorship and the future
On March 20, Lopata delivered his inaugural speech. As a professor, you are expected to be more of a manager of your research team who oversees the big picture, rather than getting your hands dirty yourself. How does he view this?
"Well, look," Lopata says, "in principle, youth is always the future, because they come with new ideas and new energy, new perspectives. My role is to ensure that the talent that's in there also comes out in the excellent students. And to get the struggling students across the finish line too."
"I once had a graduate student here who had a lot of trouble with abstract thinking and analytical skills, but who was so good practically that a paper came out of it that yielded an NWO project of eight hundred thousand euros. That's how she became one of my most impactful students."
In addition to leading his group and mentoring young researchers and students, Lopata will focus in the coming years on translating fundamental research into practical applications in the field of ultrasound, photoacoustics, and modeling.
His inaugural speech is accompanied by the symposium "Sound Solutions" which further explores the future of ultrasound.
"Let's look ahead. There's definitely music in the echo of the future"
