Optimizing Application Driven Multimodality Spatio-Temporal Emission Imaging

Molecular Medicine seeks the understanding of health and disease at the cellular and molecular level, and to use this information to design new approaches to promote health and prevent, diagnose, cure and treat disease. Molecular imaging visualizes and localizes molecular processes in vivo for diagnosis and therapy. Minute amounts of a radio-labeled compound ("tracer") are injected and the distribution of this tracer at one or multiple time points is measured thereafter. Tomographic techniques are used to obtain a volumetric image of the tracer distribution which can be analyzed and interpreted. Volumetric imaging has become clinical practice. Active research is conducted to acquire, process and analyze spatio-temporal consistent and inconsistent tomographic datasets an to assess the benefits in clinical applications. My research aims to both prepare the foundation of quantitative objective spatio-temporal image quality assessment and to apply such methods to spatio-temporal data. The methods will be applied to selected clinical applications.