A Turkish scientist carrying out academic studies in the U.S. has said that using two lasers instead of a single laser in cancer treatment could be more effective in destroying the diseased cells.

Yildiz Bayazitoglu, Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science in Houston's Rice University, used computer simulations to quantify the effect of heating nano-particles with near-infrared lasers in order to kill cancer tumors without damaging the healthy tissue.

The research, conducted by Bayazitoglu and a team of scholars, aims to raise the efficiency of destroying tumors by fine-tuning methods of heating them based on the size and composition of not only the tumor, but also the surrounding tissue.

Bayazitoglu's research on cancer treatment was published in the January issue of the "International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer".

According to the article in the journal, Bayazitoglu and her team found that attacking a tumor with two lasers could heat it more thoroughly than a single laser.

Doctor Yildiz Bayazitoglu joined Rice University in 1977. Prior to that, she received her bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at Middle East Technical University (ODTU) in Ankara, Turkey in 1967. She earned her master's and doctoral degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1969 and 1974, respectively and she was a Barbour fellow.

She has made contributions to radiation and convective heat transfer, phase-change heat transfer, thermophysical property determination, and solar collector design and analysis.

Bayazitoglu has more than 150 publications in technical journals and conference proceedings, and authored an undergraduate textbook, Elements of Heat Transfer.

She is the first Turkish scientist to receive the traditional "Heat Transfer Memorial Award" of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).


AA