We successfully organized the 2024 UC Davis Molecular Liver Imaging Symposium: Collaboration in Systemic Diseases on March 11th, 2024 in the Medical Center. Focusing on the area of liver imaging, colleagues at UC Davis Health organized three symposiums in the past eight years – the first one in 2016 (Organizers: Souvik Sarkar, MD and Michael Corwin, MD), the second one in 2020 (Organizers: Souvik Sarkar, MD and Guobao Wang, PhD), and the third one in 2024 with a particular focus on molecular liver imaging (Organizer: Guobao Wang, PhD).

Congratulations to Dr. Siqi Li for promotion to Assistant Project Scientist Step 2 and Dr. Yansong Zhu for promotion to Assistant Project Scientist Step 1 in the Department of Radiology, effective March 1st, 2024. They have significantly and uniquely contributed to our PET parametric imaging research program at UC Davis Health.

The Relative Patlak Plot method, which was developed by our lab in 2018, is now made available on commercial PET scanners by a major manufacturer for clinical use. Compared to other methods, this method does not require the early-time blood input function and is therefore much easier to integrate with a clinical scan protocol for parametric imaging.

A clinical example of applying this technique for whole-body parametric imaging on a GE clinical PET scanner is shown in a recent Clinical Nuclear Medicine report by investigators from University Hospital Zurich and GE Healthcare.

We are delighted to announce that our Ph.D. candidate Yiran Wang successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis titled “Total-body PET Kinetic Modeling and Parametric Imaging with Applications to Lung Diseases and Beyond”. Yiran conducted this research under the joint supervision of Dr. Guobao Wang and Dr. Simon Cherry. The members of his dissertation committee also include Dr. Jinyi Qi.

Yiran’s dedication and hard work have culminated in this remarkable achievement. We are immensely proud of your accomplishments. Congratulations once again, Dr. Yiran Wang!

Ms. Anahita Tavakoli joins the lab as a new graduate student. She received her B.S. degree in Cognitive Science at the University of California, Davis. Anahita will be studying how the brain is changed in systemic disease using the total-body parametric PET technology. Welcome Anahita!

Dr. Kevin Chung won the Best Abstract Award in the postdoc group at the 2023 UC Davis Radiology Research Symposium for his very recent work on the parametric imaging of blood-brain barrier permeability of radiotracers using total-body dynamic PET. Congratulations Kevin!

Our lab has two abstracts accepted by the 2023 IEEE Medical Imaging Conference on the topic of total-body PET kinetic modeling and PET-enabled dual-energy CT.

Siqi Li, BA Spencer, YG Abdelhafez, L Nardo, SR Cherry, RD Badawi, T Jones, GB Wang. Quantification of volume-of-distribution of free-state radiotracer using total-body PET kinetic modeling with time delay correction. IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference (NSS & MIC), Vancouver, November 2023. accepted for oral presentation.

Yansong Zhu, S Li, R Bayerlein, RD Badawi, GB Wang. Maximum-likelihood estimation of scatter scaling for PET-enabled dual-energy CT. IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference (NSS & MIC), Vancouver, November 2023. accepted for oral presentation.

Guobao has been promoted to the rank of Full Professor with tenure, effective on July 1st, 2023.

At the Northern California Chapter of the AAPM 2023 Young Investigator Symposium held on May 19 in San Francisco, Dr. Siqi Li tied for first place for his talk “Dynamic PET Image Reconstruction using Single-Subject Deep Kernel Learning” in the postdoc category. Congratulations, Siqi!

Dr. Kevin Chung joins our lab starting on May 1st, 2023. Dr. Chung received his Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics from the University of Western Ontario, Canada in early 2023. He developed methods and software for low-dose CT perfusion imaging and also has direct experience in PET kinetic modeling. Kevin will work on total-body PET kinetic modeling for FDG blood flow imaging and will be jointly supervised by Dr. Guobao Wang and Dr. Simon Cherry. Welcome Kevin!