LAMBDA Lab
The Lambda Lab (Laboratory of Measurements for Biomedical Applications) is part of the Measurement and Experimental Techniques area. The main research’s fields of the group are based on fiber optic and image-based measurements for biomedical applications, along with light-based approaches for minimally invasive therapy and monitoring. The Lambda Lab develops innovative and experimental solutions for thermometry in biological tissues undergoing laser and nanoparticles-enhanced photothermal treatments. The team works on novel algorithms for temperature-based therapy control, and in the field of fiber optic sensors and hyperspectral imaging for biomedical applications. Two new research lines are developed in the field of biomechanical monitoring for health and sport activities (with focus on ballet dancing), and in the field of fiber-optic sensing for continuous monitoring of environmental quantities.
Principal Investigator
Prof. Paola Saccomandi
Paola is the project coordinator of the ERC Starting Grant LASER OPTIMAL. She received the PhD in Biomedical Engineering in 2014 from "Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma". From 2016 to 2018, Paola has worked at the Institute of Image-guided Surgery of Strasbourg as research fellow and PI of several research projects. She joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Politecnico di Milano in May 2018 as Associate Professor. Her main research interests include the study and development of light-based approaches for tumor treatment and its real time monitoring, and the measurement of physiological parameters.
paola.saccomandi@polimi.it
Group members
Prof. Alfredo Cigada
Alfredo Cigada is Full Professor of mechanical and thermal measurements with the Politecnico di Milano. He is also a PI of several national and international projects aimed at the development of new sensing systems, data networks, and analysis. His main research interests include the development of new measurement systems for structural health monitoring of civil structures and cultural heritage. He is currently involved in the LASER OPTIMAL@POLIMI project (Fondazione Cariplo and Regione Lombardia).
alfredo.cigada@polimi.it
Sanzhar Korganbayev, PhD
Sanzhar is Postdoctoral Researcher (past Ph.D. Student in Mechanical Engineering in the team). He has received his MS degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. He is currently involved in the LEILA Project (European Research Council Grant) for the development of software for real-time temperature monitoring and intraoperative adjustment of the laser settings during tumor treatment. His research interests include fiber optic sensors and their applications for thermal and mechanical measurements.
sanzhar.korganbayev@polimi.it
Leonardo Bianchi, PhD
Leonardo is Postdoctoral Researcher (past Ph.D. Student in Mechanical Engineering in the team). He is currently involved in the LASER OPTIMAL Project (European Research Council Grant). His research interests deal with the investigation of laser-biological tissue interaction in presence of nanoparticles and the measurement of biological tissue thermal and mechanical properties. He is collaborating with Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri (partner of the LASER OPTIMAL project) for the experimental assessment of nanoparticle-mediated laser ablation for tumorous tissue removal.
leonardo.bianchi@polimi.it
Vikas, PhD
Vikas is a Ph.D. graduate in Physics from Central University of Rajasthan (India), and he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at City, University of London. As Research Fellow, his main research interests include plasmonics, nanophotonics, fiber optic sensors, long period gratings, 2-D materials and biosensors. He is involved in the LASEROPTIMAL@POLIMI project (Fondazione Cariplo and Regione Lombardia), for the theoretical and experimental design of fiber optic sensors for continuous monitoring of human health and environment.
vikas@polimi.it
Davide Paloschi
Davide is a Ph.D. student in Mechanical engineering. He has received his MS degree in Automation and Control Engineering from Politecnico di Milano. He is currently involved in the LASER OPTIMAL@POLIMI project (Fondazione Cariplo and Regione Lombardia) for the designing and prototyping of measurement systems based on fiber optic sensors and IMUs, with a particular focus on the development of wearable system for ballet dancer and physiological parameters monitoring.
davide.paloschi@polimi.it
Alessandro Bossi
Alessandro is a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering. He has received his master's degree in Physics Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (fall 2021). His master thesis was on time-domain diffuse Raman (TDDR), where he finalized a TDDR spectrometer. His research includes Diffuse optics and Raman spectroscopy. His main research interest is the study of the optical properties during thermal therapies using diffuse optical techniques to estimate the amount of damage received by a tissue.
alessandro.bossi@polimi.it
Pouya Namakshenas
Pouya holds a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from K. N. Toosi University of Technology. He is involved in the LASER OPTIMAL project under the European Research Council (ERC) grant, collaborating with the Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma. Currently, he is developing a computational model to optimize the laser interstitial thermotherapy for pancreatic tumor ablation. His final research goal is to translate patient-specific simulation models into clinical practice for optimal tumor removal.
pouya.namakshenas@polimi.it
Fellowships
Sundeep Singh, PhD
Sundeep is a Ph.D. graduate in Mechanical Engineering (Thermo-fluids) from the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India. Since, 2021 he is working as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Calgary, Canada on several research projects related to numerical simulations of viscoelastic fluids. His main research interest includes thermo-fluids, bio-heat transfer, bio-electromagnetics, computational fluid dynamics, computational modeling and simulation of thermal therapies for tumor treatment, and coupled multiscale problems in bioengineering.
ssingh@wlu.ca
Andrea Pacheco, PhD
Andrea received her bachelor and master’s degree in physics from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Sede Bogotá). She has experience in optical design, spectroscopy, translational research, tissue-optics, and science communication. She did her Ph.D. in Science – Physics in Biophotonics team at Tyndall National Institute (Ireland). Her PhD challenge was to evaluate the strengths and limitations in the clinical translation of Near Infra-red gas spectroscopy to develop a non-invasive bed side clinical device, to monitor lung function in neonates. She is the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship, that she will spend in the Team starting from 2024.
andrea.pacheco@tyndall.ie
Dongjoo Shin, PhD
Dongjoo Shin received Bachelor of Science degree in Electric Electronic Engineering from SungKyunKwan University, South Korea in 2017. He received his Master of Science, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea in 2023. Dr. Shin currently works as postdoctoral fellow in the department of mechanical engineering at Sungkyunkwan University and visiting postdoctoral fellow at Politecnico di Milano. His research field is focused on optical fiber and optical sensor applications.
skizp1224@gmail.com
Qi Zhang
Qi is a Ph.D. candidate in Control Engineering from Northeastern University (China). She received the Chinese Government Scholarship (CSC scholarship) in 2022 and will conduct a two-year Ph.D. research at Politecnico di Milano as a visiting Ph.D. student. Her research interests mainly include surface plasmon resonance and their applications in optical fiber sensors.
qi3.zhang@mail.polimi.it
Past Memebers
Somayeh Asadi, PhD
Somayeh is a PhD graduate in Physics from K. N. Toosi University of Technology, and she was a postdoctoral research member of the Ophthalmic Research Center (ORC) & Tissue engineering Research Center (TERC) of Shahid Beheshti University of medical science. Her main research activities in the lab were the application of nanoparticles in cancer treatment which includes the in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo studies. She was focusing on both physical simulations about the laser-tissue-nanoparticles interaction, and on related experimental setup.
Martina De Landro, PhD
Martina was a PhD Student in Mechanical Engineering. She has received her MS degree in Biomedical Engineering from Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma. She performed MS thesis at the IHU of Strasbourg, where she investigated the use of fiber optic sensors for catheters tracking. Her work was focused on the investigation of sensors and innovative images-based techniques for the monitoring of thermal outcome in tissues undergoing laser ablation.
Mohammadamin Soltani, PhD
Mohammadamin is a PhD graduated in Computer science – Artificial intelligence from Shiraz University, and he was a researcher in Traffic and transportation research center of Shiraz University. His main research interests include Optimization, Prediction models, Machine vision, Image processing, Intelligence transportation system (ITS), and Deep Neural Network (DNN). He has also twenty years of experience in web application development, have worked with several frameworks and programming languages include Python, Matlab, C++, Vue.js, Django, Nativescript, PHP, Angular.js, Keras, and Tensorflow.
Viacheslav Danilov, PhD
Senior ML Engineer and Senior Research Scientist specializing in data science, data analysis, and machine learning development. PhD in Computer Science obtained from Tomsk Polytechnic University in 2020. Over 7 years of experience as an ML Engineer & Researcher in both academic and industry domains. Experienced with every stage of the development cycle for dynamic AI projects. Well-versed in numerous programming languages and frameworks including Python, R, TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch. Worked extensively on ML tasks using a wide range of AWS services like EC2, IAM, S3, ECR, and SageMaker. Strong background in data analysis, mathematical modeling, image processing, and visualization.
viacheslav.v.danilov@gmail.com
Annalisa Orrico
Annalisa was a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering. She was working on the HYPERSIGHT project in our lab. Annalisa has received her Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering - Production System (Fall 2020). Her Master Thesis was focused on numerical simulation and LabVIEW development of temperature-driven software for controlling laser ablation therapies in biological tissue.
Ahad Mohammadi
Ahad has received his MS degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tehran. His MSc thesis majored in designing control systems in the presence of incomplete data by using Artificial Intelligence methods. His research interests fit to computational fluid dynamics, Optimization, and Design and Modeling of Transport Phenomena. He was involved in the LASER OPTIMAL project in the developing a reliable simulation to analyze the laser ablation process behavior, that was aimed to determine the physical and thermal behavior of biological tissues.
Nava Schulmann, PhD
Nava holds a PhD in Physics from Charles Sadron Institute, CNRS - Strasbourg, France. As a postdoctoral research fellow in the context of the LASER OPTIMAL project she developed a stochastic filtering framework, that aims at providing an optimal temperature map estimation, by combining bio-physical models with real-time measurements. Nava’s past research lies in the area of Complex Materials. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science (2013-2015), she participated in a science-educational project, targeting the fundamentals of Statistical Physics. As a research engineer at ICube, within the Mimesis team of Inria (2018-2019), she worked on questions related to stochastic filtering, parameter estimation and system observability.