Jennifer Barton wins $3M for tiny microscope to detect endometriosis
Next up for Jennifer Barton, who is building on her ovarian cancer detection falloposcope, is a microscopic imaging device for endometriosis, one of the leading causes of infertility.
Doctors struggle to diagnose endometriosis, a leading cause of infertility. This painful condition, which often goes undetected for years, affects more than 10% of women ages 15 to 44, according to the Office on Women's Health, an office in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Jennifer Barton, who holds the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair of Biomedical Engineering, is using a five-year, $3 million award from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to develop a microscopic imaging tool for detecting endometriosis.
“The fallopian tubes are one of those organs that nobody knows much about,” said Barton, also interim vice provost for health programs at the University of Arizona and member of the BIO5 Institute. “Yet, they are where conception takes place, and they are very important for female reproductive health.”
The team is building a 1 mm-wide scope – about the size of the tip of a sewing needle – to navigate the tiny fallopian tubes. The device uses optical coherence tomography, near-infrared imaging, to penetrate tissue and capture hundreds of images per second of cilia – hairlike tendrils that line the organs and aid in transport.
For earlier and more accurate diagnoses of endometriosis, Barton’s team is using the device to identify how cilia beat out of sync in damaged fallopian tubes.
MD-PhD candidate linchpin for study
“The people who really do the work are my students,” said Barton.
Dilara Long, a biomedical engineering doctoral student and MD-PhD candidate in the College of Medicine – Tucson, has generated data that shows OCT can precisely measure the frequency of cilia beating in human tissue samples.
The study, “Optical Coherence Tomography Enables the Depth-Resolved Measurement of Cilia Beat Frequency in Ex Vivo Human Fallopian Tubes,” was published in July 2025 in Lasers in Surgery and Medicine, the journal of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery Inc.
“Despite the important role of cilia in reproduction, little is known about how they function in the human fallopian tubes,” said Long. “We have shown that optical coherence tomography imaging can reveal the location and beat frequency of surface and hidden fallopian tube cilia, potentially advancing understanding, diagnosis and management of reproductive disorders.”