Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar

PRESENTATION: Imaging the Upper Airway During Sleep: Information Efficient MRI Methods. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) results from repeated collapse of the upper airway during sleep, yet current clinical tools struggle to characterize where and how the airway collapses. MRI can image the entire upper airway without ionizing radiation or sedation, but imaging during natural sleep requires high spatiotemporal resolution from undersampled data. Dr. Lingala's lab develops information-efficient MRI methods that maximize the physiological information obtained from each scan, spanning acquisition, reconstruction, and automated analysis.

The presentation will begin with a brief primer on MRI acquisition physics and the trade-offs that make dynamic airway imaging challenging. Dr. Lingala will then present self-supervised manifold learning methods that enable dynamic multi-slice airway imaging during natural sleep in patients with OSA. This approach reveals collapse patterns not resolved by drug-induced sleep endoscopy, which can inform patient selection for hypoglossal nerve stimulation therapy. Finally, he will describe deep learning segmentation tools that phenotype upper-airway anatomy and motion and share perspectives on silent zero-echo-time (ZTE) MRI, which removes acoustic noise as a barrier to natural sleep.

PRESENTER: Dr. Sajan Goud Lingala, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Roy J. Carver Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Radiology at the University of Iowa. He received his PhD from the University of Iowa and completed postdoctoral training in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. His research spans non-Cartesian MRI acquisition, advanced image reconstruction (low-rank and sparse models, manifold learning, self-supervised deep learning), and translation to obstructive sleep apnea and speech applications. He is the Principal Investigator of NIH R01 HL173483, which is developing dynamic upper-airway MRI to characterize sleep apnea. He is also a co-investigator on three other NIH-funded projects developing advanced MRI methods for pediatric neuroimaging and lung imaging. His honors include ISMRM Junior Fellow, an Early Career Scholar award from the Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research, and the University of Iowa OVPR Early Career Scholar award. He serves as a Guest Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.