Marvin Doyley, Ph.D.
Ph.D. Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Bioengineering Building, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5281
marvin.doyley@stonybrook.edu
+1 631.632.1815 | fax +1 631.632.8577
RESEARCH FOCUS
Imaging biomarkers for the tumor microenvironment
Solid tumors alter the mechanical and vascular properties of the tissue around them, often before they change appreciably in size. Doyley's laboratory develops quantitative ultrasound methods that measure those changes, so that a patient's response to treatment can be assessed early enough to act on. Current work centers on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, a cancer whose dense, stiff stroma both obstructs drug delivery and frustrates conventional imaging. The laboratory is establishing shear modulus and vascular perfusion as paired imaging biomarkers of response to neoadjuvant therapy, and is evaluating them with shear wave elastography in preclinical models of the disease. The goal is a measurement clinicians can act on: evidence that a therapy is working, or is not, while there is still time to change course.
Reconstruction that respects the physics
Elasticity imaging is an inverse problem. The quantity of clinical interest, the mechanical property of the tissue, is never measured directly; it is inferred from displacement estimates that are noisy, incomplete, and consistent with many possible answers. Networks trained on data alone can produce convincing images that violate the underlying mechanics, while purely model-based reconstruction is stable but slow and sensitive to modeling error. The laboratory works on the combination, integrating learned priors with physics-based models and, more recently, physics-informed neural networks, so that a reconstruction honors the governing equations while still drawing on what can be learned from data. The same question runs through the group's work on shear wave reciprocity in breast imaging: what can be recovered reliably, and how would one know.
Radiation-acoustic imaging for in vivo dosimetry
Radiotherapy delivers a dose that is carefully planned but rarely verified inside the patient. The laboratory is developing a prototype system for FLASH radiation-acoustic tomography (FRAT), which uses the acoustic signal generated as pulsed radiation deposits energy in tissue to map where that dose actually lands. Visualizing dose at depth matters most in FLASH radiotherapy, where very high dose rates and few fractions mean that small positioning errors carry large clinical consequences.
Functional ultrasound imaging of the brain
Functional ultrasound measures activity-linked changes in cerebral blood volume, occupying a useful middle ground between functional MRI and optical imaging: it resolves structure below a millimeter, at depths optical methods cannot reach, without a scanner. The laboratory has used it to map the three-dimensional arrangement of orientation domains in ferret primary visual cortex, to follow corticogeniculate feedback into the lateral geniculate nucleus, and, together with optogenetics, to read out activation of defined neuronal populations. A second line applies transcranial functional ultrasound in mice to neurological disease, where it has revealed pathway-specific reorganization of the visual system in a model of juvenile Batten disease. Much of the accompanying methodological work concerns what limits the measurement: clutter filtering, thresholding, and how reliably a small activation can be separated from noise.
Beyond these themes, the laboratory applies magnetic resonance elastography and optical depth sensing to problems in neurological disease and cancer biology, including learning and memory deficits in people with HIV and fluorescence kinetics in subcutaneous tumors.
EDUCATION AND TRAINING
- 2000, Ph.D. in Biophysics, University of London, Institute of Cancer Research, London, U.K.
- 1994, B.Sc. with Honors in Applied Physics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, U.K.
Professional experience
- 2026 to present, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University
- 2026 to present, Visiting Faculty, University of Rochester
- 2022 to 2026, Wilson Professor of Electronic Imaging, University of Rochester
- 2020 to 2026, Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester
- 2019 to 2026, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering,Biomedical Engineering, and Imaging Sciences, University of Rochester
- 2015 to 2018, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering,University of Rochester
- 2013 to 2018, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester
- 2009 to 2015, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering,University of Rochester
- 2008 to 2013, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester
- 2004 to 2008, Research Assistant Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth College
- 2002 to 2008, Research Assistant Professor of Radiology, Dartmouth Medical School
- 2001 to 2002, Research Associate, Dartmouth College
- 1999 to 2001, Research Associate, Department of Experimental Echocardiography, Erasmus University, Rotterdam
HONORS
- Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2023
- Fellow, American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM), 2023
- Fellow, Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), 2023
- Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), 2020
PUBLICATIONS
Publications via Google Scholar.
COURSES TAUGHT
- BME 271, Introduction to Circuits (Stony Brook University)
- ECE 284/484, Machine Learning in Medical Imaging (University of Rochester)
- ECE 247/447, Digital Image Processing Using Python (University of Rochester)
- ECE 242, Communication Systems (University of Rochester)
FUNDING AGENCIES
- National Institutes of Health (NIBIB, NCI)
- National Science Foundation
- Wilmot Cancer Institute
Career research support exceeds $19M as principal investigator, multiple principal
investigator, or co-investigator, with more than
$500K in training grants.
LAB WEBSITE