MEMP PhD Thesis Defense: Georgia Jones

Intravascular Polarimetry: Developing Quantitative Tools for Coronary Plaque Assessment

Coronary artery disease remains the leading cause of mortality worldwide, with plaque rupture responsible for the majority of acute coronary events. While intravascular imaging has emerged as a powerful clinical tool for assessing plaque morphology, conventional approaches suffer from limited compositional contrast, restricting their ability to reliably characterize plaques. Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) provides depth-resolved metrics of tissue birefringence, depolarization, and optic axis orientation that provide contrast for collagen organization and lipid content, which are critical determinants of plaque stability. However, PS-OCT's clinical translation has been impeded by increased system complexity and cost, relegating its use primarily to specialized research laboratories. The work presented in this thesis provides the foundational tools to enable polarimetry in existing clinical intravascular imaging workflows, democratizing access to advanced plaque characterization. We present four complementary innovations: (1) SIPS-OCT, which extracts polarimetric information from unmodified clinical systems by capitalizing on inherent system polarization mode dispersion, (2) CapSeg, a fully automated volumetric fibrous cap thickness and composition assessment tool achieving measurements comparable to expert manual annotation, (3) depOFDI, a quantitative lipid burden metric with strong concordance to the current clinical gold standard, which is deployable on existing commercial platforms without additional hardware and (4) depth-resolved optic axis orientation mapping revealing previously undescribed heterogeneity in healed plaque architecture. Together, these advances establish a pathway for rapid clinical adoption of polarimetric imaging, enabling comprehensive plaque characterization at the point-of-care to improve risk stratification, enable further studies, and guide personalized intervention strategies.

Thesis Supervisor:
Martin Villiger, PhD
Investigator, Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Mass General Research Institute
Assistant Professor of Dermatology, Harvard Medical School

Thesis Committee Chair:
Brett Bouma, PhD
Associate Physicist, Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Mass General Research Institute
Professor of Dermatology, Harvard Medical School

Thesis Readers:
Lida Hariri, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School

Aaron Aguirre, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Cardiology, Harvard Medical School
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Topic: Georgia Jones MEMP PhD Thesis Defense
Time: Wednesday, July 8, 2026, 10:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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