The Bowen Lab focuses on the development of tools for hybrid positron emission tomography (PET) (e.g. PET-CT and PET-MR), and complimentary modalities (e.g. CT), to advance precision imaging for the care and study of oncology, neurology, and cardiology patients. The combination of quantitative metrics from PET and CT or MR has been shown to dramatically improve disease detection, diagnosis, staging, and therapy response monitoring for a large array of clinical domains. Thus, advances in hybrid quantitative imaging may have a substantial benefit on patient care.
We investigate advanced acquisition techniques, reconstruction algorithms, and post-processing methods for quantitative imaging. In all instances our goal is to translate these methods to research studies and patient scanning. The primary areas of research are currently developing advanced PET attenuation correction methods that use the PET signal-alone, assessing a joint reconstruction and scatter estimation PET scatter correction method, and developing a classifier that uses topical radiation sensors to detect radiotracer infiltrations.