November 2015 – ICREA Research Professor; February 2009 - Group Leader – Medical Optics. Dr. Turgut Durduran is a group leader at ICFO. He moved to ICFO from University of Pennsylvania (USA) to found the ICFO-Medical Optics group in 2009, received tenure in 2014 and became an ICREA processor in 2015. Over the years, the group has grown exponentially, currently, with a large number of PhD students, post-docs and engineers collaborating with many hospitals and biomedical institutes world-wide. He has coordinated projects funded by the European Commission, Spanish National Ministries and the National Institutes of Health. He is active in bench-to-bedside translation of diffuse optical technologies including spin-off generation and medical device approvals.

My work focuses on medical applications of diffuse light through the use of the physical models of photon propagation in tissues, including the speckle statistics of diffuse light. In a nutshell, I take advantage of the fact that light could travel many centimeters in living tissues and carry clinically and physiologically relevant information from “deep” (>1 cm) tissue volumes. This enables us to combine advanced physical models, instrumentation and algorithms to explore clinical and basic biomedical applications.

We mostly focus on quantifying local, microvascular blood oxygenation, blood volume and blood flow that are three quantities critical to sustaining cellular oyxgen metabolism. Their quantification and the derivation of additional parameters from combination with other physiological parameters and also through their dynamic patterns is very relevant in understanding development, normal tis sue tissues and their impairments.