Radiological students excel at international competitions

5/11/2016 Susan Mumm, Editor

Written by Susan Mumm, Editor

Radiological students excel at international competitions

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Nuclear Science Symposium/Medical Imaging Conference

Graduate student Andrew N. Groll’s paper won Third Place, Best Paper Competition among 130 student submissions at the IEEE NSS/MIC in fall 2015. Groll submitted “Hybrid Pixel-Waveform CdTe Detectors: Towards Sub-300 um Resolution PET Imaging of Transgenic Mice with Neurodegenerative Diseases,” with researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. The work is highly valued for its potential application in preclinical studies aimed at investigating various transgenic mouse models with neurodegenerative disease through specialized CdTe hybrid semiconductor detectors. Specifically, Groll’s interests lie in looking at the onset of beta-amyloid and tau protein formation in Alzheimer disease based models. The secondary benefit of this work is that a focus on Alzheimer’s leads to natural application in other brain diseases as well. Currently, many individuals are exploring Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) which is a brain stem disease just recently found in many NFL athletes. The physiological markers present in AD are very similar to that of CTE leaving many opportunities for expanded research.

Graduate student Xiaochun Lai’s paper was selected as Finalist for Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE NSS/MIC. Lai submitted “First Sub-500μm-Resolution Simultaneous SPECT/MRI Imaging with the MRC-SPECT-I: An Ultrahigh Resolution MR-Compatible SPECT System Using Highly Pixelated Semiconductor Detectors.” This presentation reports the latest progress on the development of one of the world’s first SPECT camera allowing simultaneous SPECT and MR imaging, and the first simultaneous MR-SPECT images of therapeutically-engineered neural stem cells in mouse brain.

Society of Nuclear Medicine and Medical Imaging (SNMMI) 2015 Annual Meeting

Lai was recognized with Second Place, Best Poster Presentation Award, for his poster on the group’s development of simultaneous imaging using Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Groll and fellow graduate student Jonathan George both were picked to be among the top five finalists and were recognized with Honorable Mentions in competition for the Young Investigator Award in the SNMMI Conference’s Computer and Instrumentation competition.

 


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This story was published May 11, 2016.