Stretchable catheter technology could revolutionize detection of dangerous arterial plaque

Arterial plaque is not the enemy you meet at the dentist's office. Inside your arteries, it takes the form of fatty buildup that can narrow blood vessels and choke off blood flow. Some of these deposits sit quietly for years, stable and manageable. Others grow unstable, prone to rupture. When one tears loose, a blood clot forms in seconds. That clot can lodge in a coronary artery and trigger a heart attack, or travel to the brain and cause a stroke. The problem has always been the same: doctors can see that plaque exists, but they struggle to tell which deposits are ticking time bombs and which ones will never cause harm.

Hangbo Zhao, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at USC's Viterbi School, has been working on a way to change that. His approach abandons the idea of better imaging in favor of something more direct—using electrical measurements to read the composition and metabolic activity of plaque itself, revealing details that conventional ultrasound and CT scans simply cannot capture. The National Institutes of Health has taken notice. Last year, Zhao received a Trailblazer Award from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, a grant designed to support early-stage researchers who blend engineering, physics, and biology to solve urgent medical problems.

The technical challenge is deceptively simple to state and fiendishly difficult to solve. Blood vessels are soft, curved, and constantly moving. Most medical electronics are rigid. Thread a stiff device into a living artery and you get poor contact, inconsistent readings, and potential damage to the vessel wall. Zhao's group has spent years developing a manufacturing process that builds circuits from liquid metal—material that can bend, stretch, and conform to tissue without losing electrical function. These flexible circuits are then integrated onto a balloon catheter, the kind of device that cardiologists already know how to thread through narrow vessels in a compact, folded state.

Once the catheter reaches the target site, the balloon inflates gently. As it expands, the stretchable electronics unfold and press uniformly against the artery wall. That close, even contact is the key. It allows the device to take consistent electrical measurements all the way around the vessel, building a three-dimensional map of the plaque's electrical properties. That map, in turn, reveals which deposits are metabolically active—which ones are changing, growing, and at higher risk of rupture. Zhao is careful to frame this not as a replacement for existing imaging but as a complement to it, a tool that gives physicians information they do not currently have.

The work is still in early stages. Zhao is collaborating with Tzung Hsiai, a professor of medicine and bioengineering at UCLA, to test the catheter in animal models of cardiovascular disease. Those experiments will show whether the device works as designed under conditions that mimic real human physiology—whether the electronics remain stable, whether the readings are reliable, whether the balloon can inflate and deflate without damaging the vessel. If the animal work succeeds, human trials could follow. The potential is significant: a tool that could help cardiologists decide which patients need aggressive treatment and which ones can be monitored safely, which plaques demand intervention and which ones can wait. In a field where the wrong call can mean the difference between life and death, that kind of precision matters.