Dr. Siqi Li and Dr. Kevin Chung attended the SNMMI Annual Meeting in Toronto, June 8-11, 2024. Each of them presented their latest work on total-body PET kinetic modeling and parametric imaging.

Siqi Li, YG Abdelhafez, L Nardo, SR Cherry, RD Badawi, GB Wang.Total-body parametric imaging using relative Patlak plot with self-supervised deep learning noise reduction.2024 SNMMI Annual Meeting, Toronto, June 8-11, 2024

Kevin J. Chung, YG Abdelhafez, BA Spencer, T Jones, Q Tran, L Nardo, S Sarkar, V Medici, V Lyo, RD Badawi, SR Cherry, GB Wang. Single-tracer imaging of molecular blood-brain barrier permeability-surface area with total-body PET. 2024 SNMMI Annual Meeting, Toronto, June 8-11, 2024.

Photo credit: Dr. Lorenzo Nardo

Dr. Yiran Wang’s research on dynamic PET imaging of the dual-blood supply effect in lung tissue and lung tumors was featured in the Headlines of UC Davis Health News on June 7th:

“Lung cancer breakthroughs: New imaging technologies may change course for top cancer killer”

This was one of the works that Yiran had done during his Ph.D. research under the joint supervision of Dr. Guobao Wang and Dr. Simon R. Cherry. His paper is currently in press in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. Congratulations, Yiran!

At the Northern California Chapter of the AAPM 2024 Young Investigator Symposium held on May 17th in Davis, Dr. Kevin Chung won the First Place prize in the Postdoc category for his talk “Imaging the Molecular Permeability of the Blood-Brain Barrier with a Single Total-Body Dynamic PET Scan.”  Congratulations, Kevin!

UC Davis has received two patents on parametric PET techniques that explore the molecular transport properties of radiotracers for clinical applications after four years since filing. One patent (inventors: Guobao Wang, Souvik Sarkar, and Ramsey Badawi) is on a liver parametric PET method for measuring hepatic inflammation in fatty liver disease. In combination with CT for measuring steatosis, the liver parametric PET/CT method can be used to noninvasively diagnose and characterize metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). The other patent (inventor: Guobao Wang) is for a technique that uses high-temporal resolution kinetic modeling to enable widely used radiotracers (e.g., 18F-FDG) for quantitative measurement of blood flow, enabling single-tracer multiparametric PET imaging for several clinical applications.

Dr. Yiran Wang (who is now a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF) received the Alavi-Mandell Award from the Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM) for his two JNM papers in 2023:

Wang Y, Spencer BA, Schmall J, Li E, Badawi RD, Jones T, Cherry SR, Wang GB. High-temporal resolution lung kinetic modeling using total-body dynamic PET with time delay and dispersion corrections. Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 64 (7) 1154-1161, 2023.

Wang Y, Nardo L, Spencer BA, Abdelhafez Y, Li EJ, Omidvari N, Chaudhari AJ, Badawi RD, Jones T, Cherry SR, and Wang GB. Total-Body Multiparametric PET Quantification of 18F-FDG Delivery and Metabolism in the Study of COVID-19 Recovery. Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 64 (11) 1821-1830, 2023.

The award is given to individuals who were the first author of a paper published in the JNM, were trainees at the time the published work was carried out, and made a major contribution to the completion of the work. The aim is to encourage young physicians and scientists to pursue a career in academic and research in nuclear medicine.

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!