Development of a dedicated head and neck positron emission tomography system
Dr.
Shiva
Abbaszadeh
Assistant
Professor
University
of
Illinois
at
Urbana-Champaign,
Department
of
Nuclear,
Plasma,
and
Radiological
Engineering
Current head and neck cancer diagnosis and treatment planning suffers from poor spatial resolution of whole-body positron emission tomography (WB-PET) scans. In the neck, where tissue layers are thin, the spatial resolution of WB-PET (4-6 mm) is not sufficient to evaluate small lymph nodes (<5 mm), establish how far the tumor has invaded locally, and guide the decision to resect a tumor rather than irradiate and deliver chemotherapy. In this talk I will introduce PET imaging and discuss how to address this problem by translating high-resolution radiation detection technology to head and neck imaging. Then I will discuss the development of a PET system based on cadmium zinc telluride detector technology. System characterization and methods to improve sensitivity will also be discussed.
Bio: Shiva Abbaszadeh is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering. She was previously a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Radiology at Stanford University and received her PhD in ECE at the University of À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ (Ontario, Canada). Her research interests include radiation detection and instrumentation for molecular imaging, computational problem solving, and quantitative characterization of biological processes. Shiva is a member of IEEE and SPIE and has received a number of awards for her work on medical imaging technology (Mitacs Elevate Fellowship, SPIE Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship, and the NIH-sponsored Stanford SMIS T32 award).
Coffee and Timbits available