Dr. Guillermo Tearney is a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, an affiliated faculty member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and the Mike and Sue Hazard Family Research Scholar at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Tearney received his medical degree magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School and holds a doctoral degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Tearney laboratory at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine focuses on the development and clinical validation of non-invasive, high-resolution optical imaging methods for disease diagnosis. Dr. Tearney’s lab was the first to perform human imaging in the coronary arteries and gastrointestinal tract in vivo with optical coherence tomography (OCT), which provides cross-sectional images of tissue architectural microstructure at a resolution of 10 μm. Dr. Tearney has also conducted many of the seminal studies, validating OCT and is considered an expert on OCT image interpretation. Recently, Dr. Tearney’s lab has invented a next-generation OCT technology, termed μOCT, which has a resolution of 1 μm and is capable of imaging cells and subcellular structures in the coronary wall. Dr. Tearney has also developed several other technologies, including a confocal endomicroscope capable of imaging the entire esophagus, an ultraminiature three-dimensional endoscope, a highly efficient form of near- field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM), and novel fluorescence spectroscopy and multimodality imaging techniques. He has an active program in Raman spectroscopy and has conducted the first intracoronary Raman in vivo.
Dr. Tearney is co-editor of “The Handbook of Optical Coherence Tomography” and has published more than 170 peer-reviewed articles, including many that have been highlighted on the covers of Science, Nature Medicine, Circulation, Gastroenterology, and the Journal of American College of Cardiology.
Dr. Tearney’s work extends beyond his laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, where many of his technologies are being produced commercially. He founded the International Working Group on Intracoronary OCT Standardization and Validation, a group dedicated to establishing standards to ensure the widespread adoption of this imaging technology.