Associated Lab Members
- Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering in Radiology
Amir H. Goldan, Ph.D., develops photon-counting x-ray imaging and PET medical imaging detectors and systems. The research of Dr. Goldan, who received his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, has been funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Recently, the NIH awarded Dr. Goldan a $6.25M U01 grant to develop Prism-PET, a high-performance, compact, portable, upright brain PET scanner featuring motion compensation and CT-less attenuation correction. For clinical translation, Dr. Goldan and the XEIL Lab will use [18F]MK6240 radiotracer, which has subnanomolar affinity for tau neurofibrillary tangles. They will leverage Prism-PET imaging's ultra-high resolution topographical capabilities — such as uptake in small regions like the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus — to perform early-stage Braak staging in asymptomatic individuals with mild cognitive impairment.
- Graduate Student
Soroush Shabani is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Cornell University Physics Department. His research focuses on developing a non-linear forward model and differentiable inverse rendering for PET image reconstruction.
- Graduate Student
Wanbin Tan is a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering (medical physics) at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on motion tracking and correction, kinetic modeling, and clinical studies in PET imaging.
Research Projects
The major goals of this funded U01 grant are:
1.) Develop a compact, portable, cost-effective, and upright brain PET scanner — known as Prism-PET — with ultra-high resolution, high sensitivity, motion compensation, and CT-less attenuation correction.
2.) Integrate the Prism-PET brain scanner with our ultra-high resolution...
The large axial field-of-view PET scanners, such as the United Imaging EXPLORER and the Siemens Biograph Vision Quadra, can experience severe image blur due to parallax artifacts. In this funded R01 grant, the XEIL Lab will address this via depth encoding by developing practical single-ended PET detector modules with depth-of-interaction...
XEIL Lab has developed a prototype High-Resolution Arbitrary Path Photon Counting Mammography (HiRAP-PCM) scanner. This platform employs photon-counting (PC) technology (55-micron meter pixels with CdTe detectors) and robotic arms to perform mammography along arbitrary trajectories in 3D space, improving...
The XEIL Lab has developed a new high-resolution image reconstruction framework based on a physically-based differentiable rendering of the emission image, which aims to produce the highest-resolution PET images due to accurate Monte Carlo (MC)-based forward modeling of the imaging system. We will use a differentiable objective...
The XEIL Lab has developed a novel technological platform called Motion-tracked Immersive functional Positron Emission Tomography (MIf-PET) with high temporal and spatial resolution (i.e., ∼ 1 s frame time interval and...