Awards and Honors: August 2, 2007

Posted 2:09 PM, August 2, 2007, by jaruiz

Peter Olcott (on left), graduate student in the Bioengineering Department and member of the Molecular Imaging Instrumentation Laboratory, and Guillem Pratx, MS, (on right) graduate student in electrical engineering and a member of the Molecular Imaging Instrumentation Laboratory, have both won Bio-X Travel Awards. Mr. Pratx received his award for his oral presentation entitled, "Acceleration of Fully 3-D List-Mode OSEM for High-Resolution PET Using Graphics Processing Units," which he gave at the 9th International Meeting on Fully Three-Dimensional Image Reconstruction in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine. Mr. Pratx has developed real-time software for an intra-operative gamma camera and is now focusing on practical image reconstruction algorithms for high-resolution, pre-clinical PET systems. Mr. Olcott was granted his award at the 2007 Society of Nuclear Medicine Conference for his presentation, "Evaluation of a New Readout ASIC for a 1 MM Resolution PET System Based upon Position Sensitive Avalanche Photodiodes." His research focus is on delivering clinical imaging instrumentation for the Department of Radiology and the Molecular Imaging Program. Initially, he developed an intra-operative, hand-held gamma ray camera (or nuclear imager) for the surgical staging of cancer. Currently, he is engineering two novel clinical PET systems. The first system is the data acquisition electronics for a dual panel PET mammography camera. The second is a new PET detector for a combined clinical PET/MR scanner.