Ginger Schmidt

Ginger Schmidt

Ph.D. Candidate in Medical Engineering & Medical Physics @ Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology

Publications

Asynchronous optical coherence elastography and directional phase gradient analysis

Published in Journal of Biomedical Optics (SPIE), 2025

We developed a high-speed, practical method for three-dimensional shear wave imaging using standard optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems already widely availabe in clinics. Our approach reduces motion sensitivity and hardware demands while providing robust measurements of tissue stiffness, as validated in benchtop experiments across variable wave conditions.

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Coronary Artery Flow Modeling in an Ex-vivo Biorobotic Heart

Published in 2025 IEEE 8th International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), 2025

I collaborated with Ellen Roche’s lab at MIT to develop an ex-vivo biorobotic coronary artery simulator to model spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) and test percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI). Using a porcine heart with soft robotic actuators and a synchronized flow loop, physiological coronary flow and myocardial motion where accurately replicated, enabling realistic stent deployment and intravascular OCT assessment. I contributed to OCT imaging, signal processing, and validation.

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Asynchronous, semi-reverberant elastography

Published in Optica, 2024

We present a method for complete recovery of the harmonic shear wave field in an asynchronous, conventional frame-rate, raster-scanning OCT system by modeling raster-scanning as an amplitude modulation of the displacement field. This technique recovers the entire spatially and temporally coherent complex-valued shear wave field from just two B-scans, while reducing the time scale for sensitivity to motion from minutes to tens of milliseconds. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first successful demonstration of reverberant elastography on a human subject in vivo with a conventional frame-rate, raster-scanning OCT system, greatly expanding opportunity for widespread translation.

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