Emory University School of Medicine

The mission of the Physics and Computing group is: extracting physiologic information from radiologic images, evaluating new radiotracers, improve the quantitative accuracy of PET imaging, and quality control of the PET scanners.  There is a very close working relationship between this group and the radiopharmaceutical development lab.  That lab provides all of the radiotracers and this lab provides all of the image analysis.  Originally, our research was kinetic modeling of dynamic PET images.  This included measuring the density of different proteins in the brain (DAT, SERT, NET, D2), amino acid transport into tumor tissue, and local cerebral glucose metabolism and blood flow under different sets of conditions.  More recently, the kinetic modeling techniques have been used to determine renal blood flow and glomerular flitration rate from approximately dynamic sets of MRI data.