Imaging technology sheds light on blood clots

Every year, more than 30,000 Australians develop serious blood clots. When these blood clots (known as thrombosis) end up in arteries in the lungs, heart or brain, the consequences are often deadly.

With time of the essence, having the right diagnostic tools to detect blood clots can help medical professionals save lives.

Dr Peter Su, from the UTS School of Biomedical Engineering, is pioneering novel imaging technology that can visualise blood clotting in super-fine detail.

His research team has been backed by a major injection of $1.6 million in funding from a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator Grant and $450,000 from the NSW Health, Office of Health and Medical Research.

“We’re developing advanced or super-resolution microscopy tools so we can draw a map of how thrombosis works at the molecular scale. I’m providing a high-resolution map for the blood cells related to disease,” Dr Su says.

“If you want to explore a new place, you need a detailed map find your way around. In the same way, we need a similar high-resolution map to guide us in understanding thrombotic diseases.”

Taking technology from benchtop to bedside

Dr Su and his team are building a portable blood clotting imaging chamber that combines their imaging technology with a microfluidic channel.

The device will not only help with more accurate and earlier diagnosis of thrombosis, it will help doctors test therapeutics and develop personalised medicines for patients.

“The chamber is going to mimic a blood vessel and will help a doctor predict when there could be a blood clot. Then, if someone has a higher chance of forming a clot, we’ll be also test whether a particular drug will be better in the individual’s case,” he says.

“Currently, when a doctor gives their patient an anti-coagulate drug it dissolves the blood clot. But some patients have bleeding issues in their brains so they need a different approach to treatment.”

He has long-term plans to take the technology from the laboratory benchtop to the bedside.

He aims to have a portable device being tested in clinical practice studies at the end of his current five-year research program, and a fully portable device being commercialised for us by practitioners in hospitals and clinics after that.

“If you go into a hospital with thrombosis now, the doctor might do an ultrasound which is low resolution. Ultra-high resolution diagnostic technologies like ours are just beginning to become available now,” Dr Su says.

“It’s a skill to unlock the secrets of diseases at the molecular level and map these to the associated risk factors to make diagnostic decisions. I want to revolutionise the way we understand disease using nanoscale imaging.”

The research program is a long-term collaboration between Dr Peter Su at UTS and Professor Arnold Ju from USYD biomedical engineering. Their collaboration has been recognised as the finalist in the 2025 UTS VC Research Excellence through Collaboration Award.