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Better image quality at lower radiation dose is the immediate need being addressed by the research project led by Ge Wang, Biomedical Imaging Division of the Virginia Tech.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death globally and a tremendous burden on the healthcare system. Better detection of hardening or clogging of arteries and other blood vessels before symptoms occur is needed. With funding from the National Institutes for Health (NIH), researchers from Virginia Tech and GE Global Research Center are developing novel cardiac computed tomography ( CT ) architectures and methods, including a newly patented approach to a long-standing challenge in local CT image reconstruction (Patent 7,697,658 "Interior Tomography and Instant Tomography by Reconstruction from Truncated Limited-angle Projection Data" issued April 13, 2010). The research team will also evaluate the performance of various cardiac CT system designs to determine the most promising designs and demonstrate their clinical feasibility and utility.

Better image quality at lower radiation dose is the immediate need being addressed by the research project led by Ge Wang, the Pritchard Professor and director of the Biomedical Imaging Division (www.imaging.sbes.vt.edu) of the Virginia Tech – Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering & Sciences (SBES), and Bruno De Man, a CT authority at GE Global Research Center.

Interior tomography is a theoretical breakthrough, and Wang and colleagues as well as peer groups have been developing it and publishing results. The patent application was filed in 2007. The proof of concept was an important basis for the aforementioned NIH grant.

By applying interior tomography to medical CT , radiation exposure can be reduced, and a large patient can be accommodated because the focus will be on the region of interest and not the entire body.

The patented approach to interior tomography and instant tomography by reconstruction from truncated limited angle projection data was developed by Wang, Ye, and Yu. Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties Inc. has filed numerous patent applications for inventions by Wang's team, most of which improve the performance of biomedical imaging. Research has been funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Cancer Institute, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National Science Foundation, and other funding agencies.

Wang said that he expects that the cardiac CT systems and methods identified by the NIH-funded project will significantly improve diagnostic performance and therapeutic outcomes.

Source: Virginia Tech

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