Dr. Tinsu Pan | Data-driven gated PET/CT free of misregistration artifacts (MEFOMP webinar 1)

MEFOMP webinar 1:

18F-FDG whole body (WB) PET/CT is a comprehensive imaging modality for structural, functional, and molecular phenotyping of cancer at the WB level and is a standard imaging tool for managing cancer patients for surgery, radiation therapy (RT), chemotherapy, or a combination of these treatments. Unlike MRI and CT, normally acquired in breath-holding, almost all PET/CT data are acquired during free breathing (FB) due to limited PET system sensitivity. The influence of respiratory motion is unavoidable, posing a challenge for quantitative image analysis, tumor localization, surgical planning, and treatment response assessment of the functional PET data. Artifacts from respiratory motion are manifested in tumor blurring and/or misregistration between PET and CT. In this presentation, we will discuss the advancement of data-driven gated (DDG) PET and DDG CT to make every PET/CT scan data free of tumor blurring and misregistration.

Biosketch:
Dr. Pan is a professor in the Department of Imaging Physics of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1991 and joined M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in 2003 after Nuclear Medicine Research at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and Computed Tomography R&D in GE Medical Systems. He designed both cardiac CT and 4D CT on the GE LightSpeed CT scanners and contributed to the first 4D PET/CT research of Dr. Sadek Nehmeh at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2002. In 2019, his invention and publication of 4D-CT was curated as one of the 19 milestone papers by Medical Physics on “Significant Advances in CT” in honor of the 40th anniversary of Cormack and Hounsfield’s 1979 Nobel Prize for the development of the CT scanner. He also invented average CT to improve the registration between CT and PET and designed a data-driven gated (DDG) CT for PET/CT to mitigate the respiratory motion artifacts in PET/CT at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. He is board-certified by both ABSNM and DABR.