Jiawen Li

Jiawen Li, 34, engineered a tiny device to help cardiologists with a common problem: how to tell which patients may be at greatest risk of heart attack.

Li’s innovation, an ultrathin 3D-printed endoscope, is designed to probe inside a blood vessel and generate high-quality images of the plaques that build up over a lifetime. Most of these plaques pose little danger, but certain types risk blocking arteries and causing them to rupture. None of the probes used by physicians today are good enough to reliably predict which plaques are likely to cause trouble. This often leads to costly overtreatment or—worse—sudden death.

Li, a biomedical engineer at the University of Adelaide in Australia, set out to build a “camera” that would give clinicians the image quality they need—while still being small enough to fit inside an artery. Her approach combines two light-based imaging techniques into a single lens no bigger than a grain of salt; together, they provide a high-resolution snapshot of a plaque’s structure, as well as molecular clues about the likelihood of rupture. Working with researchers in Germany, she developed a way to print the lens onto a fiber-optic cable as thin as a human hair, which can be fed through the arteries and toward the heart.

Li and her colleagues have successfully tested the device in pigs and are working toward clinical trials in humans. In addition to improving diagnosis of heart disease, they think it could eventually help physicians detect cancer in hard-to-image areas, including the bile duct (which carries bile from the gallbladder to the small intestine to aid digestion) and the lungs.