NJIT's Dhawan Wins a Coveted IEEE Award for a Widely Used Cancer Detection Device

For a pioneering invention that enables doctors to use light to look beneath the outer layer of the skin to detect diseases such as early-stage skin cancers, NJIT’s Atam Dhawan was tapped this year to receive one of IEEE’s preeminent honors, the Engineering in Medicine and Biology (EMBS) William J. Morlock Award.

Established in 1960, the Morlock Award is given every two years to an inventor of original electronics techniques and concepts used to solve biomedical problems. However, Dhawan, a distinguished professor of electrical engineering and senior vice provost for research, is the first to receive it since 2015.

His touted innovation was the creation and translation of low-angle transillumination imaging devices for healthcare applications, such as detecting skin cancer cells, isolating glucose from blood and illuminating webs of painful spider veins.

“Malignant melanoma is a dangerous disease. If it isn’t caught early, it can metastasize with a very high mortality rate,” said Dhawan, who began researching screening methods for moles while a graduate student at the University of Manitoba studying spectroscopy, of his initial focus. “If we can detect it in stages I-to-3, we can do a wide-area excision and the patient will be disease-free. In the later stages, patients have on average 16 weeks to live and $100,000 hospitals bills.”

Moles, so-called “beauty marks,” are benign balls of melanocyte, dark, light-absorbing cells in the epidermis and dermis that migrate to form clusters. But they can become activated by the energy in UV light, particularly in people with a family history of skin cancer and in those who spend a lot of time in the sun.

The first changes that begin 1-to-2 mm beneath the surface are detectable under a microscope, but they are invisible on the surface of the skin. CT scans and MRI also aren’t effective, because the cancer cells aren’t deep enough.

“We have preventive measures such as mammograms for breast cancer, but there was no such modality at the time for skin cancer screenings,” he recounted. “The idea was that the procedure should be as non-invasive as the electroencephalogram. I’m fascinated by light and thought there must be other diagnostic methods besides X-rays we might harness.”

Shining a bright visible light on the skin just illuminates the surface. Dhawan therefore researched different areas of the spectrum to find light waves that, when directed at a 45-degree angle, can penetrate as deep as 3-to-3.5 mm. The patterns created when light scatters upon hitting different types of cells reveal their shape. Dense clusters of melanocyte cells absorb the light, while photons hitting thinner masses will keep changing direction.

“The amount of light that re-emerges tells me how much melanocyte is below the surface,” he noted.

Dhawan has since used a variety of wavelengths to detect different cells and chemical compounds in the body. His latest patent is for imaging technology that isolates glucose in the blood.

In translating his technology into a first device, he determined that it must be portable and simple enough that at a general practitioner could use it in the office. He worked with medical schools to develop and test it and began the process of commercializing it with a colleague at the University of Houston. To fully participate, he would have needed to leave academia, however, so he handed it off to an entrepreneur and investor who started a company that first used the technology to locate difficult-to-see veins to treat spider vein disease. After developing VeinLite, they created the DermLite series of products to image skin-lesions for early detection and characterization of skin cancers.

Dhawan was recently at a medical appointment recently when his dermatologist entered the room with a familiar device in hand. “You know, I invented that,” he said, setting off a scramble for autographs among the doctors and nurses.

In choosing him for the Morlock award, Dhawan was also lauded for his leadership in point-of-care technologies.

He is the founding editor-In-chief of the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, which he still edits, and the founding chair of the IEEE EMBS technical committee on Translational Engineering and Healthcare Innovations. He has organized and chaired numerous international conferences on point-of-care technologies and healthcare innovations for IEEE-EMBS, National Institutes of Health (NIH)-IEEE and NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He has published more than 215 research papers and book chapters and authored and co-authored several books on medical imaging and image analysis.

Among other honors, Dhawan is a fellow of IEEE, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering.