Emory University School of Medicine

The mission of the Physics & Computing lab is to extract physiologic information from radiologic images, evaluate new radiotracers, improve the quantitative accuracy of PET imaging and to provide quality control for the PET scanners. Originally, the lab's research was primarily kinetic modeling of dynamic PET images and critically evaluating new radiotracers in collaboration with the Radiopharmaceutical Discovery Lab. This included measuring the density of different proteins in the brain [e.g., dopamine transporter (DAT), serotonin transporter (SERT), norepinephrine transporter (NET), D2-dopamine receptor, Amyloid-Beta], amino acid transport into tumor tissue, local cerebral glucose metabolism, and blood flow under different sets of conditions. More recently, the kinetic modeling techniques have been extended to determine renal blood flow and glomerular filtration rates from dynamic sets of MRI data.  Currently we are working on incorporating subject motion, as measured by an external stereo camera, into image reconstruction to improve image resolution.

                                                                                                                  - John Votaw, PhD
                                                                                                                    Vice Chair for Research
                                                                                                                    Director, Physics & Computing