Seminars

Imaging Technology Developments in Quantitative PET and SPECT

Chi Liu, PhD
Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Associate Director of Yale Biomedical Imaging Institute
Yale University

This seminar will be covering topics of image reconstruction, motion correction, attenuation correction, and noise reduction for quantitative PET and SPECT imaging for the heart, cancer, and brain. AI-based imaging technologies will be focused.

Quantification in Contrast-Enhanced-Mammography

María-Ester Brandan, PhD
Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM

The speaker has coordinated the medical physics group at the UNAM Physics Institute for more than 20 years. One of the main projects has been the development of techniques and the accompanying formalism to quantify iodine uptake in radiological images of Contrast-Enhanced Mammography (CEM) using iodinated contrast media and dual-energy techniques. The seminar will present the project’s main achievements. We´ll discuss the methodology and structural adaptations required to implement pioneering medical physics investigations in a newly established clinical research environment. The participation of students has been essential, and we’ll include an overview of the UNAM master’s program on medical physics and its impact on strengthening the profession in Mexico.

Small-Molecule Zinc-Phthalocyanine Optoacoustic Agents -radiation-free metabolic imaging of peritoneal metastasis and a path to phototheranostics

Sanhita Sinharay, PhD
Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Science

Detecting cancer where it is hardest to see, such as disseminated across the peritoneum or buried in deep-seated, treatment-resistant tissue, remains a central challenge for molecular imaging. The clinical mainstay for visualizing metabolically active tumors, ¹⁸F-FDG PET, delivers ionizing radiation, depends on costly radiopharmacy infrastructure, and resolves millimeter-scale disease poorly, and these constraints are especially limiting in resource-constrained settings.

This seminar presents small-molecule optoacoustic (photoacoustic) probes built on a zinc-phthalocyanine (ZnPc) scaffold as a versatile platform that aims to respond to that problem. I will focus on Glucose-Phthalocyanine (GPc), a first-of-its-kind, water-soluble, tetra-glucose-conjugated ZnPc that reports tumor glucose avidity, a radiation-free counterpart to FDG for imaging superficial tumors within a 5 cm depth. As a demanding test case, the presentation will focus on how GPc, imaged by multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT), detects and longitudinally tracks peritoneal metastases in an intraperitoneal OVCAR-8 and OVCAR-3 ovarian cancer model, matched with the gross pathology and histology data.

I will then extend the platform from diagnosis to therapy: asymmetric ZnPc constructs that couple deep-tissue optoacoustic imaging with NIR-activated, ROS-generating photodynamic therapy, which we demonstrated in a pancreatic cancer model. Together, these results position the zinc-phthalocyanine scaffold as a single chemistry for translational imaging.