I have had students work on image formation projects in PET, SPECT, X-ray CT, MRI, microscopy, radiation therapy, and biomedical signal detection. It is not feasible for me to keep this list current. To get a sense of what my group is doing, look under the "publications" section of my web page for papers that are in review and in press, and for recent conference papers.

To see my current projects, look at my vita (cv), which will be more current.

Below are some past projects, from back in the days when I had fewer projects so I had more time to update this...


Statistical Methods for Attenuation Correction in ECT
NIH R29 CA 06711
Student: Hakan Erdogan
One of the most important physical effects in positron emission tomography (PET) is photon attenuation. To correct for the affects of attenuation, PET scans are preceded by a transmission scan, which is usually very noisy. Traditional attenuation correction methods are suboptimal since they do not fully account for the noise in the transmission measurements. We are developing methods for estimating the attenuation correction factors based on statistical models for the transmission measurements. This work has led to new algorithms for tomographic image reconstruction. We are also developing methods for joint estimation of transmission and emission data from "post-injection" transmission scans, which are contaminated by emission counts.
Spatial Resolution Properties of Penalized-Likelihood Image Reconstruction Methods
Whitaker Foundation
Student: Web Stayman
We have shown that traditional methods for regularizing ill-conditioned problems such as tomographic image reconstruction lead to shift-variant spatial resolution when the measurement statistics are nonstationary. In this project we are developing improved regularization methods that yield uniform spatial resolution even for shift-variant tomographic systems.
Estimation Strategies for Nuclear Medical Imaging
PI: W. Leslie Rogers (with A. O. Hero and N. H. Clinthorne)
NIH R01 CA 54362
Student: Mehmet Yavuz
In this project we are developing improved image reconstruction methods for imaging small animals with a Michigan-designed SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography) system known as SPRINT. The project includes statistical methods for analyzing and predicting system performance based on lower bounds on mean-square error.
Positron Emission Tomography of Breast Carcinoma
PI: Richard L. Wahl
NIH R01 CA 52880
In this project we are evaluating the efficacy of fully 3D PET for imaging breast cancer.