Matt Keller Ph.D. Candidate 5824 Stevenson Center Nashville, TN 37235 matthew.d.keller@vanderbilt.edu
Education: B.E. in Biomedical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, 2003 Research: Matt has been involved with several research projects in the lab. His Master's work involved using organotypic raft cultures as a model of skin to see if Raman spectroscopy could detect malignancy associated changes in the epithelium for stromal disease. His primary focus for his Ph.D. work is using Raman, fluorescence, and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy to evaluate the surgical margin status of breast tissue following tumor resection. Removing a small (1-2mm) layer of normal tissue around the tumor during partial mastectomies is a key factor in preventing recurrence of breast cancer, and definitive diagnoses via histopathology take several days. Other methods are available to examine the margins intraoperatively, but these all have shortcomings that can potentially be overcome by using optical spectroscopy and spectral imaging. Both combined fluorescence and reflectance and Raman have demonstrated strong abilities to properly classify breast tissues, and work is underway to expand these techniques to look at a larger area at once and to ensure that they are sampling from the proper depth of tissue.  Matt has also been involved in a side project investigating the use of Raman and NIR fluorescence spectroscopy to identify parathyroid tissue during neck surgeries, since this task can be quite difficult to the naked eye, and the parathyroid glands are of critical importance to life. Personal Bio: Matt is currently a 5th year graduate student in the biomedical optics lab at Vanderbilt University. He received his B.E. in biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt in 2003, and his M.S. in biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt in 2006. He expects to finish his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering some time in 2009. Matt has been supported in his graduate work by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Pre-doctoral Fellowship, and he was the recipient of the Founder's Medal for his undergraduate class of 2003. Matt has been married to his lovely wife Kelly since the summer of 2005, and they are proud "parents" of their cat Conan. Interests include travel, trivia, hiking, and golfing. Publications: Majumder SK, Keller MD, Kelley MC, Boulos FI, and Mahadevan-Jansen A. Comparison of autofluorescence, diffuse reflectance, and Raman spectroscopy for breast tissue discrimination. Journal of Biomedical Optics (in press), 2008. Keller MD, Majumder SK, Kelley MC, Meszoely I, Boulos FI, and Mahadevan-Jansen A.  Optical spectroscopy for therapeutic guidance in breast conserving therapy. In: Proceedings of SPIE (Schweitzer D and Fitzmaurice M, eds.), 66280J, 2007. Majumder SK, Keller MD, Kelley MC, and Mahadevan-Jansen A. Optical detection of breast tumors - a comparison of diagnostic performance of autofluorescence, diffuse reflectance, and Raman spectroscopy. In:  Proceedings of SPIE (Vo Dinh T and Cohn G, eds.), 6430C, 2007. Keller MD, Kanter EM, and Mahadevan-Jansen A. Raman spectroscopy for cancer diagnosis (cover), Spectroscopy 21(11), 33-41 Nov, 2006.
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