XEIL Directory

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.

Eric Petersen is completing his Ph.D. in medical physics at Stony Brook University. His work is driven by applying analytical and statistical methods to modeling and optimizing high-resolution PET imaging systems. Specifically, he has demonstrated the utility of Bayesian and Maximum Likelihood methods in identifying inter-crystal scatter events and applying depth-dependent position corrections. Additionally, he has explored outlier identification techniques based on the Wasserstein distance metric to identify scattered events and apply crystals-specific depth calibrations.

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.

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.