The Yokohama NSS 2021 will be held online simultaneously with the 2021 Medical Imaging Conference and the 28th International Symposium on Room Temperature X-Ray and Gamma-Ray detectors. The meeting, which should have been held in Yokohama, will now offer more flexible opportunities for scientists and engineers working in the field of radiation instrumentation to present new results and discuss the latest developments in a large variety of application fields in the virtual world.
The NSS program basically keeps with the same trends from the past years but it expands to include the latest trends in detector technology, radiation detection, detector materials, new instrumentation techniques, and their implementation in high energy and nuclear physics, astrophysics, accelerators, national nuclear security, and many other applications in various types of radiation environments. As we are continuing the virtual conference from the last year and reflecting on our experiences, we plan to take advantage of more parallel sessions, including joint sessions with the MIC and RTSD, while special topic workshops will cover areas of specific interest. Short courses on a variety of traditional as well as novel topics of interest proposed by the NSS community in Japan are also being offered.
Authors are invited to submit papers describing their original, unpublished work on one of the topics below:
Electronics and Methods
Detector Development
Applications
We invite you to submit your valued papers to the virtual Yokohama conference and contribute to this broader and excellent program. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions or if we can help with any aspects of the program.
We look forward to seeing you at the virtual NSS 2021.
Takaaki Kajita is the Distinguished Professor at TheUniversity of Tokyo, and also the Director of Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) of The University of Tokyo.
Kajita received his Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo School of Science in 1986, and has been researching at Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande detectors at Kamioka Observatory in central Japan.
In 1998, at the Neutrino International Conference held in Takayama, Gifu, he showed the analysis results which provided strong evidence for atmospheric neutrino oscillations.
In 2015 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in discovering atmospheric neutrino oscillations.
Currently, he is the project leader for KAGRA Project, aiming to explore the gravitational wave astronomy.
To be announced later.
Akira Furusawa received his MS degree in applied physics and Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from The University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1986 and 1991, respectively. His research interests cover the area of nonlinear optics, quantum optics, and quantum information science.
He is currently Professor of Applied Physics, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo and the Deputy Director of RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing. Professor Furusawa has authored more than 100 papers in leading technical journals and conferences, which include the first realization of continuous-variable quantum teleportation, which was achieved in 1998 at California Institute of Technology as a visiting scientist at Professor Jeff Kimble’s lab.
He received the Ryogo Kubo Memorial Award in 2006, the JSPS prize in 2007, the Japan Academy Medal in 2007, the International Quantum Communication Award in 2008, the Toray Science and Technology prize in 2015, and the Medal with purple ribbon in 2016.
He is a member of the Physical Society of Japan, the Japanese Society of Applied Physics, and the Optical Society of America.
To be announced later.
The IEEE Medical Imaging Conference (MIC) is a leading international scientific meeting to discuss the latest physics, engineering, and mathematical aspects of medical imaging with a particular focus on ionization radiation.
Medical imaging is a continuously growing field while detectors, instrumentation, modern computational methods, and integrated systems are leading the way towards technological advances
MIC has a unique focus on cutting edge technologies as well as their effective translation to clinical practice. In recent years, interest has increased in applications of machine learning, AI, and other rapidly emerging areas of research which will be also dealt with. Physics and engineering solutions for medical unmet needs are another important topic.
MIC is an opportunity for students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior and senior researchers from around the world to come together and share their new ideas and results of innovations and scientific endeavors.
The scientific program of the MIC consists of oral and poster sessions, plenary sessions, and a student award session. Regular sessions will be complemented by Short Courses and specialized Workshops covering timely topics in medical imaging and therapy.
Authors are invited to submit papers describing their original, unpublished work on one of the topics below:
Note: abstracts utilizing deep learning and artificial intelligence will be integrated into the above topics depending on the use case
Iwao Kanno is a pioneer in nuclear medicine physics in Japan. Born in Japan in 1946, he majored in electrical engineering at Tohoku University, Sendai. After graduation in 1970, he worked as a research scientist in the Department of Radiology & Nuclear Medicine at the Akita Research Institute of Brain and Blood Vessels. He developed a prototype SPECT system and software to calculate cerebral blood flow (CBF) from 133Xe tomography. He also designed the first hybrid SPECT and PET system (HEADTOME), and established a 15O PET laboratory in 1980-90. He was appointed director of the department in 1990. In 2006, he was invited as the Director of the Molecular Imaging Centre at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba. During his time as Director, he oversaw the establishment of a microcirculation research laboratory centred on two-photon microscopy. He has maintained a solid interest in neurophysiology, CBF/metabolism, and neurovascular coupling even after his official retirement as a director in 2015.
Since the mid 1970’s, several groups in the United States, Europe and Asia had built prototype positron emission tomography (PET) devices that were applied to cardiovascular diseases, central nervous system dysfunctions and malignant tumours. These attempts demonstrated that PET images can provide important information to help understand in vivo pathophysiology. The success of these early PET studies spurred further development of new technologies over the next few decades. Recent improvements such as depth-of-interaction (DOI) and time-of-flight (TOF) detectors have enabled both high resolution and high sensitivity. In the future, new ideas such as whole gamma imaging (WGI), which is the simultaneous detection of positron annihilation and single gamma-rays, will open up new horizons in nuclear medicine imaging.
The essence of PET is quantitative measurement of in vivo biology. There are two steps to the quantitative measurement. The first step is to measure a raw image of the tracer concentration with appropriate corrections for unwanted coincidence events (e.g., scatter, random, attenuation) and distortions occurring inside the detector. The second step is to convert the raw concentration image into an image carrying biological information. The conversion is performed on the basis of well-characterized physical and chemical interactions between tracers and tissues. The physical interactions include tracer delivery and washout through diffusion and perfusion of blood flow, while the chemical interactions are the processes by which tracers bind to or are released from receptors in tissues.
The ability to perform reliable quantitative measurements with PET has led to many benefits for neuroscience. For example, quantitative measurement of cerebral glucose metabolism has enabled the spatiotemporal visualisation of neuronal activity. Quantitative measurement of cerebral blood flow and oxygen metabolism during neural stimulation disproved the hypothesis of tight coupling between oxygen supply and demand. Quantitative assessment of ischemic level after stroke provides useful clinical information for reperfusion. In addition, quantitative in vivo assay of novel ligands used to image neurorecepters, inflammation and abnormal proteins (e.g., amyloid, tau) has provided a better way to diagnose neurological disorders. While these examples focus on the brain, quantitative PET can be applied to any organ in the body.
Masaaki Sato is a general thoracic surgeon at the University of Tokyo Hospital and an associate professor at the Organ Transplantation Center, The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Medicine. He graduated from Kyoto University, Faculty of Medicine in 1999 and earned his PhD at the University of Toronto. His focuses are lung transplantation, lung mapping for precise minimally invasive lung resection, and education. He has been the director of a new lung transplant program in Tokyo since 2015, and it is now one of the largest programs in Japan. In research, he proposed the concept of restrictive allograft syndrome (RAS) as a novel phenotype of chronic rejection after lung transplantation in 2010 while he was a surgical trainee in Toronto. Since then, he has significantly contributed to the establishment of this new disease entity in the international medical community. In 2012, when he was an assistant professor at Kyoto University, he developed a novel technique of virtual-assisted lung mapping (VAL-MAP). This bronchoscopic preoperative lung mapping technique uses virtual images, allowing for precise minimally invasive lung resection. As a principal investigator, he has led three prospective multicenter clinical trials using VAL-MAP and its new version (VAL-MAP 2.0), finally resulting in the technique being covered by public health insurance in Japan. Through these clinical and academic experiences, he has written multiple textbooks regarding medical research, presentation, and academic writing, thus playing a leading role for young investigators.
Research in medical imaging, including nuclear science (e.g., positron emission tomography), allows us to visualize what is not clear and to recognize what is not properly recognized. Through my experience as a surgeon-scientist, I keenly realize the value of visualization and recognition.
As a thoracic surgeon specializing in lung surgery, I have been involved in hundreds of operations, including lung transplantation. These procedures are sometimes thrilling experiences. To avoid the risk in surgery, two things are important: vision (i.e., manipulation in the blind spot is dangerous) and recognition (i.e., you must be able to identify what you are seeing).
This principle applies to many things, including research: what you see and what you want to see are important for recognition. In 2010, when I was a surgical trainee in Toronto, I found a novel phenotype of chronic rejection after lung transplantation. I named this condition restrictive allograft syndrome (RAS), which is now well recognized as indicative of a poor prognosis. Interestingly, until then, no one had recognized the disease even though it had existed for decades and its differences from the conventional phenotype of chronic rejection were obvious in physiology, radiological imaging, and pathology. One of the main reasons for this underrecognition is that chronic rejection was defined by a single parameter of lung physiology (a decline in the forced expiratory volume in 1 second). Although this is a simple clinical tool for diagnosis, it diverted most physicians’ attention from other parameters. It might be because I was just a novice in the field that I could recognize the difference between real patients and a textbook, carefully observing what was actually happening without bias. How important observation is! Then we can make a hypothesis based on careful observation. Finally, a thorough inspection results in the accumulation of data that supports the hypothesis. To recognize something, we need to engage in careful observation and inspection.
What if we cannot see what we want to see? How can we recognize it? Besides lung transplantation, lung cancer resection is another important procedure. Advances in imaging technology have led us to encounter an increasing number of early-stage small lung cancers. This is generally good news, but it has made our business challenging—we cannot identify small, soft tumors during surgery. In the early 2000s, a computed tomography-guided preoperative marking technique using a hookwire was applied to mark a tumor, in an effort to overcome this challenge. However, it became clear that this technique could cause the rare but serious and potentially fatal complication of air embolism. Unfortunately, some of the early-stage lung cancer patients died because of the marking procedure; these patients would have lived for the next 5 years even with no treatment. We almost abandoned the method in the late 2000s, leaving two options: resecting the entire lung lobe to ensure complete resection of the disease although such resection is oncologically unnecessary, or waiting for the small tumor to grow large enough for us to palpate. Because neither seemed ideal, I came up with a third option, which is now known as Virtual-Assisted Lung Mapping (VAL-MAP). Using a bronchoscope, we tattooed the lung in multiple spots by utilizing virtual bronchoscopy based on thin-slice computed tomography images. This strategy has been very successful not only in localizing small tumors but also (beyond my initial expectation) in helping surgeons determine correct resection lines (i.e., navigation surgery). Furthermore, as the next version of the technique, we added intrabronchial microcoil placement, transforming the two-dimensional lung map on the lung surface into a three-dimensional map by adding a “z-axis.” With these technical advances, thoracic surgeons are now seeing different scenery not previously visualized during lung cancer surgery. A novel visualization technique can really be a game-changer.
To summarize my surgeon’s point of view, careful observation and inspection are necessary to overcome prejudices and assumptions and thus to achieve correct recognition. Better visualization is critical for better observation. This represents a totally new window through which people can start to see and recognize what has been underrecognized. I look forward to the continued development of many exciting new imaging technologies in the future.
The 28th International Conference on Room-Temperature Semiconductor Detectors (RTSD) represents the largest forum of scientists and engineers developing compound semiconductor radiation detectors and imaging arrays operable at room temperature. Room-temperature semiconductor radiation detectors are finding increasing applications in such diverse fields as medicine, homeland security, radiography, astrophysics and environmental characterization / remediation. The objective of this conference is to provide a forum for discussion of the state-of-the-art of room-temperature-operating detector technology based on compound semiconductors, including materials improvement, material and device characterizations, fabrication, electronic readout and applications. To provide a comprehensive review, oral and poster presentations representing a broad spectrum of research and development activities emphasizing semiconductor detectors or imaging devices are sought.
The 2021 NSS–MIC Short Course program offer 7 courses on a wide range of hot topics in nuclear science and medical imaging. All of the courses will be given by experts in their fields and provide comprehensive views of the topic. All of the courses will be available for registered participants during the entire conference week; therefore, one can attend two or more courses that are offered in parallel. The participants can review the materials as many times as desired, at their convenient time from their home or office. This is one of the merits virtual conferences make possible and Short Courses in 2020 were a lot more popular and attended than years past. We encourage you to take an advantage of it this year as well.
This year the Short Course program runs from Saturday, 16th of October, to Monday, 18th of October, thus, enabling all of attendees to take part in the NSS and MIC Joint Sessions on Tuesday, 19th of October.
For more information, please contact:
Date/time: Saturday, 16th, October, 9 pm–2:30 am (Japan time) (8 am–1:30 pm, EDT)
Instructors: Paul O’Connor, Raffaele Giordano
Course Description: This one-day course is intended to introduce physicists and detector specialists to the fundamentals of integrated circuits (IC), front end design, and radiation-hardened design.
The course provides an overview of analog design methodologies and semiconductor devices and then delves into the details of implementing practical circuits in modern CMOS technology. In the second part of the course, the participants will learn state-of-the-art design techniques to implement radiation-hardened reconfigurable digital circuits in the radiation detection readout. A basic knowledge of detectors and electronics is assumed.
Lecture1: Paul O’Connor, 9 pm – 0:30 am JST
Lecture2: Raffaele Giordano, 1:00 am – 2:30 am JST
Biographies:
Paul O’Conner
Senior scientist and group leader for the Instrumentation Division of Brookhaven National Laboratory.
O’Connor is a senior staff scientist and leads the Signal Processing and Electronics group in the Instrumentation Division of Brookhaven Lab. He attended Brown University, earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1977 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1980. He joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a member of the technical staff in 1980 and arrived at Brookhaven Lab’s in 1990. He is an author on more than 100 publications and has seven patents for microelectronic and detector technologies.
Raffaele Giordano, Ph.D
Associate Professor, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy
Giordano is associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Naples Federico II (Unina), Italy. He received the master’s and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the same institution in 2007 and 2010, respectively. As a postdoctoral researcher and assistant professor he has been involved in experiments at CERN and at the Japan High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, KEK. Since 2016, he is a faculty member at Unina where he leads R&D projects on novel instrumentation for High-Energy Physics. He is an author of more than 390 scientific papers and holds two international patents for digital oscillators and radiation hardening techniques.
Date/time: Sunday, 17th, October, 9 pm–11:00 am (Japan time) (8 am–10:00 am, EDT)
Instructor: Masako Iwasaki
Course Description: This course introduces the various applications of the modern machine learning (ML) technique to the collider experiments. ML has been used in many collider experiments for 20-30 years, mainly for the classification in the data analysis (signal vs noise, flavor-tag, etc.) Recently ML technology has dramatically improved, and various modern ML techniques provide more precise and effective data processing in the collider experiments. In this course, a brief introduction of ML, and ML applications for data processing processes (calibration, data analysis, ..) in the collider experiments will be shown. Several introductory examples will also be provided.
(course outline)
Biography:
Masako Iwasaki
Associate Professor, Osaka-City University, Osaka, Japan
Masako Iwasaki is an associate professor in the Department of Physics, Osaka City University, Japan. She is also a researcher in NITEP, Osaka City Univ., a specially appointed associate professor in RCNP, and IDS, Osaka Univ. She took her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Nara Women’s University in 1993 and 1996, respectively. She has been involved in many high energy experiments of SLD, BaBar and ILC in US (SLAC), T2K, Belle, and Bele II in Japan. She also worked on SuperKEKB accelerator. Since 2018, she has been leading a group consists of experimental and theoretical physicists and information scientists, for ML application to the collider experiments, as a RCNP project, in RCNP, Osaka Univ.
Date/time: Sunday, 17th, October, 9 pm–10:30 pm (Japan time) (8 am–9:30 am, EDT)
Instructor: Angelika Hofmann, Ph.D. (Yale University, SciWri Services)
Course Description: In science, the best data mean little unless it is communicated well. The course will cover fundamental areas of scientific writing all scientists need to know to promote their research and career successfully. Dr. Hofmann will provide an overview of the basic principles of scientific writing style and composition and explain how to apply these principles to writing research papers and grant proposals. Hands-on exercises will be included, and emphasis will be on how to achieve maximum impact and success with the reader and reviewer in mind.
Biography:
Angelika Hofmann, Ph.D.
Strategic Projects and Communications Advisor
Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Yale University
Founder and President, SciWri Services
As Strategic Projects and Communications Advisor, Angie Hofmann works closely with Yale’s Vice Provost of Research in coordinating the implementation of academic priorities in the sciences across the University. In her role, she also leads strategic communications efforts for the research team and manages strategic committees including for entrepreneurship and innovation as well as for research reactivation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before joining the VPR team in 2018, Angie was Director, Corporate and Foundation Relations, Science and International Initiatives, in Yale’s Office of Development where she managed some of Yale’s most important prospects and played a key role in fundraising from leading international corporations and foundations. As part of this position, she also oversaw a team of professional scientific writers and the operational management of the Corporate and Foundation Relations office.
Angie holds a PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry from the University of California, Irvine, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany. She is renowned in the scientific writing field. She is the founder and President of SciWri Services, a venture providing editing, training, and consulting services worldwide. She is also the author of two books that have become standards in the field of scientific communication: Scientific Writing and Communication – Papers, Proposals, and Presentation (Oxford University Press, 3.ed., 2016) and Writing in the Biological Sciences (Oxford University Press 3.ed., 2018).
Date/time: Saturday, 16th, October, 9 pm–3:30 am (Japan time)
Instructor: Rafael Ballabriga (CERN), Marc Kachelriess (DFKZ), Mats Persson (KTH), Mats Danielsson (KTH), Adam S. Wang (Stanford University)
Course Description: This course provides a comprehensive overview of photon counting CT imaging from basic principles to the state of the art: clinical applications of the technology, detector design, ASIC design, and CT image formation algorithms. The course is designed for engineers and physicists who wish to gain or deepen the knowledge on this emerging field of research.
Lecture 1: Marc Kachelriess (DFKZ) (marc.kachelriess@dkfz.de)
Lecture 2: Mats Persson (KTH) (mats.persson@mi.physics.kth.se) and Mats Danielsson (KTH) (md@mi.physics.kth.se)
Lecture 3: Rafael Ballabriga (CERN) (rafael.ballabriga@cern.ch)
Biographies:
Prof. Dr. Marc Kachelrieß is chair of the division of X-Ray Imaging and CT of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany. After finishing his diploma in theoretical physics he started his PhD research on metal artifact reduction in CT in 1995. In 2002 Marc Kachelrieß completed all post-doctoral lecturing qualifications (habilitation) for Medical Physics and in 2005 he was appointed Professor of Medical Imaging at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Since 2009 Marc Kachelrieß additionally holds an Adjunct Associate Professor position at the Department of Radiology at the University of Utah, USA. In 2014 Marc Kachelrieß was appointed full Professor of X-Ray Imaging and CT at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany. His research interests are basic algorithmic and physics aspects of tomographic imaging with ionizing radiation, with a focus on x-ray computed tomography.
Mats Persson of KTH received his MSc in Engineering Physics in 2011 and his PhD in Physics in 2016, both from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His PhD work was centered on photon-counting spectral CT imaging with a photon-counting silicon strip detector. After working as a postdoc at Stanford University and as a visiting postdoc at General Electric Research Center, he returned to KTH in 2020 where he is now an Assistant Professor of Physics. His research interests are centered on image reconstruction and mathematical performance modeling for photon-counting spectral CT.
Mats Danielsson of KTH received his MSc in Engineering Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1990. From then until 1996 he pursued research with the CPLEAR experiment at CERN, the European Facility for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. He received his Ph.D. 1996 with the thesis titled First Direct Measurement of T-violation, based on the first measurement of violation of the Time symmetry. From 1996 to 1998 Mats Danielsson worked as a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA on research in detectors and integrated electronics for x-ray imaging. From 1999 up to now he has been employed at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm where he currently holds a position as Professor and heads the research group in medical imaging. Together with Staffan Holmin at Karolinska Institutet Mats Danielsson took the initiative to MedTechLabs that was approved in 2017 by the Stockholm city council and he is now co-director for its research program in imaging and minimal invasive techniques. Mats Danielsson further co-founded Sectra Mamea AB (sold to Philips in 2011), C-RAD (listed at Nasdaq) and Prismatic Sensors. Mats Danielsson holds around 50 patents and is co-author of over 100 peer reviewed scientific publications in journals such as Medical Physics, Physics in Medicine and Biology, Journal of Medical Imaging and Nature and the articles have been referenced more than 4000 times.
Rafael Ballabriga is a graduate of the Ramon Llull University in Barcelona (BSc 2000, MSc 2002). In 2004, he joined CERN microelectronics group, Geneva (Switzerland), in the framework of the CERN Doctoral Student Program to work in the design and characterization of hybrid pixel detectors.
Rafael Ballabriga received the IEEE NPSS Best Student Paper Award in 2006. He defended his PhD thesis entitled “The Design and Implementation in 0.13um CMOS of an Algorithm Permitting Spectroscopic Imaging with High Spatial Resolution for Hybrid Pixel Detectors” in 2009 for which he received the best thesis award of the Ramon Llull university doctoral programme 2009-2010. In 2013 he received the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Radiation Instrumentation Early Career Award.
Rafael Ballabriga has coached younger designers in the design of front-ends in CMOS technologies. Holds three patents and has authored or co-authored more than 70 peer-reviewed journal publications.
Adam Wang, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Radiology and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he leads the Advanced X-ray and CT Imaging lab. His research interests include photon counting CT, spectral x-ray imaging, novel x-ray/CT systems and algorithms, and AI applied to image acquisition, processing, and reconstruction. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2018, Dr. Wang completed his PhD at Stanford in 2012, on the topic of maximizing the information content of spectral x-ray imaging. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in 2014, on iterative reconstruction and image registration of cone-beam CT for image-guided surgery. Afterwards, Dr. Wang was a Senior Scientist at Varian Medical Systems (2014-2018), developing systems and algorithms for image-guided radiation therapy.
Date/time: Monday, 18th, October, 9 pm–2:00 am (Japan time)
Lead instructor: Jinyi Qi, Ph.D. (UC Davis) and Andrew Reader, Ph.D. (King’s College London, UK)
Course Description: Medical imaging reconstruction has progressed from analytic reconstruction methods, model-based iterative reconstruction, to the latest learning-based and learning-enhanced reconstruction methods. This course starts from key fundamentals in tomographic image reconstruction and then covers a range of approaches of applying artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) methods to image reconstruction. We will use positron emission tomography (PET) as the primary example, but the basic principles are applicable to other imaging modalities.
Course Outline:
Biographies:
Jinyi Qi is a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California – Davis (UC Davis), USA. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1998. Prior to joining the faculty of UC Davis in 2004, he was a Research Scientist in the Department of Functional Imaging at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Qi served as the Interim Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis from 2015 to 2016. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE TMI and IEEE TRPMS, and is an elected Fellow of AIMBE and IEEE. His main research interests concern the development of advanced image formation and processing tools to push the boundary of molecular imaging using positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT).
Andrew Reader is a professor of imaging sciences at King’s College London, United Kingdom. He received his Ph.D. in medical physics from the University of London in 1999 on the subject of PET image reconstruction. Prior to joining the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences at King’s College London in 2014, he was a Canada Research Chair at McGill University and the Montreal Neurological institute for 6 years. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE TRPMS and has co-authored over 200 scientific outputs. His main research interests include PET-MR, multi-modal image reconstruction and medical image analysis, all now with a primary emphasis on exploiting deep learning.
Date/time: Sunday, 17th, October, 9 pm–12:15 am (Japan time)
Instructor: Dennis R. Schaart, Ph.D. (Delft University of Technology)
Course Description: Remarkable progress is being made with regard to the timing performance of scintillation detectors. For example, the time resolution of clinical time-of-flight PET systems has improved from 500 – 700 ps FWHM in the second half of the 2000s to about 200 ps FWHM for the latest available systems. In the laboratory, coincident detection of annihilation photon pairs with a time resolution of about 30 ps FWHM has recently been demonstrated. These advancements are driven by innovations in scintillation materials, photosensors, readout electronics, detector design, and signal processing. In addition to medical applications, the results of these developments can be applied in many other domains, such as materials science, nuclear physics, and high-energy physics.
The improvement of scintillation detector time resolution requires the optimization of the entire detection chain. A sound understanding of the underlying physics and statistics greatly facilitates such efforts. Therefore, a substantial part of the course will be devoted to the theory of scintillation detector time resolution. It will be shown how the physical limits of time resolution are governed by scintillation photon counting statistics and, as such, by fundamental properties of the scintillator (such as its light yield and pulse shape) and the photosensor (e.g. its photodetection efficiency and single-photon time resolution).
Based on the insights offered by this analysis, we will study the history, state-of-the-art, and ongoing developments in scintillation materials and photosensors. Special attention will be paid to detectors based on silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), as the introduction of this new light sensing technology has been a main driver of time resolution improvement since several years. Attention will also be paid to the increasing importance of detector design, which affects the kinetics of scintillation photon transport, as well as on the possibilities to mitigate the resulting loss of time information though the concept of time resolution recovery.
The course consists of three parts:
Biograpy:
Dennis R. Schaart heads the Medical Physics & Technology section at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). He worked in academia as well as in the medical device industry, always at the intersection of physics, technology, and medicine. He started as an R&D physicist at Nucletron (now Elekta), where he developed new devices for radiotherapy. He obtained his doctoral degree (with highest honors) in 2002. He then joined TU Delft to set up a new research line on in-vivo molecular imaging technology, with special focus on ultrafast detectors for time-of-flight positron emission tomography (TOF-PET). His team was among the first to explore the use of silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) in TOF-PET and has published many works on the fundamentals of SiPM-based detectors and the theory of scintillation detector timing. Dennis’ current research interests range from novel molecular imaging technologies to image guidance in radiotherapy. He leads the Technology for Oncology programme of the TU Delft Health Initiative and serves as a member of the R&D Program Board of the Holland Particle Therapy Centre (HollandPTC). He has (co-)authored more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and is a frequently invited speaker.
Date/time: Saturday, 16th, October, 9 pm–2:00 pm (Japan time) (8 am–1 pm, EDT)
Instructor: Roger N. Gunn (Invicro & Imperial College London, UK), Marc D. Normandin (Massachusetts General Hospital, USA), Guobao Wang (University of California at Davis, USA)
Course Description: Dynamic PET imaging with tracer kinetic modeling can provide images of physiologically important parameters that have the advantages of creating higher lesion contrast, being quantitative, and allowing single tracer multiparametric imaging as compared to standard static images. Conventionally, dynamic PET parametric imaging was hampered by limited scanner sensitivity and axial field-of-view. State-of-the-art commercial PET scanners now have achieved unprecedented sensitivity and also enabled simultaneous dynamic imaging of the entire body. It is becoming increasingly feasible to exploit kinetic modeling and parametric imaging for various clinical applications. This course will provide an overview of the basics of PET tracer kinetic modeling and parametric imaging and clinical applications. It will also cover recent advances in total-body PET kinetic modeling. The intended audience is anyone who would like to gain a better understanding of PET kinetic modeling and parametric imaging.
Biographies:
Roger Gunn is CSO, Neuroscience at Invicro Konica Minolta and Professor of Molecular Neuroimaging at Imperial College London. In his role at Invicro, he is heading the companies CNS strategy including the R&D of new biomarkers, analytics and leading the design, analysis and delivery of clinical imaging trials for pharmaceutical companies. He has held executive management positions in industry for the last 10 years with responsibility for a wide range of scientific imaging portfolios. He is also the founder and a director of MIAKAT Ltd which develops image analysis software for PET imaging data. He has published over 200 peer reviewed papers in the field of imaging with an h-index of 64 and has delivered over 80 invited lectures. His career has involved positions on research councils, consultancy to pharmaceutical companies and the training and mentoring of PhD students and clinical research fellows.
Marc Normandin is an Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr Normandin’s work spans a variety of laboratory and medical imaging techniques toward the development and application of noninvasive physiological measurement technologies and assessment of therapeutic interventions. To that end, he utilizes pharmacokinetic analysis techniques, radiosynthetic/analytic procedures, and molecular biology assays to characterize biological processes in cell culture, tissue samples, and in vivo imaging in animals and human subjects. He is a recognized worldwide as a leader in molecular imaging, especially quantitative methodology for PET and MRI, and serves the scientific community through teaching locally at Harvard and MIT and internationally in the acclaimed PET Pharmacokinetics Course held annually as a satellite to the NeuroReceptor Mapping and BrainPET conferences.
Guobao Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology, University of California Davis Health. His research commonly integrates multidimensional (e.g., dynamic) PET data acquisition with the design of advanced computational imaging algorithms to derive quantitative and multiparametric imaging biomarkers for reducing the burden of human diseases. His lab develops new kinetic modeling methods to account for differences in radiotracer delivery and transport for organ-specific and total-body parametric imaging, as well as learning-based tomographic image reconstruction methods to overcome the noise challenge in parametric imaging with PET. In close collaboration with clinicians, his group is actively pursuing novel clinical translation of PET/CT parametric imaging in various diseases, including fatty liver disease, heart disease, and metastatic cancer. He is a recipient of NIH/NIBIB Trailblazer Award and NIH/NCI Paul Calabresi Clinical Oncology K12 Scholar.
In this year’s workshops, we have asked leading experts in their respective fields to present on the current status of a wide range of cutting-edge technological developments. Topics range from the development and application of basic measurement techniques, to the decommissioning of nuclear reactors, which is being addressed using all available technologies, and to the practical application of nuclear medicine. All of these topics are designed to be of interest to non-specialist audiences, and to provide an opportunity for researchers from different fields to interact with each other.
While the presentations at the workshops will be given by experts, the discussions are expected to include researchers from all fields. In particular, young researchers are expected to participate in the discussions based on new dispatches.
Satoshi MIHARA
The planned workshops include:
Workshop date: Sunday 17 October 2021 (TBC)
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (FDNPS), operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Inc., went into meltdown after the occurrence of a large tsunami caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. Ten years have passed since the accident, and during that time, radiation measurement methods have been developed by groups in various countries to recover the environment in Fukushima Prefecture and to decommission the FDNPS. Dose rate mapping in an outdoor environment is being carried out through car-borne surveys and aerial monitoring, and these results are continuously provided to the national and local governments. On the other hand, in order to facilitate the decommissioning of the FDNPS, technologies such as dose rate monitoring by fiber type detectors in the containment vessel and visualization of the location of fuel debris by muon tomography have been developed. Visualization of radioactive substances using gamma-ray imagers and remote monitoring using a combination of robots and radiation detectors have also been implemented. In this workshop, the technologies developed for the environmental recovery of Fukushima and the decommissioning of FDNPS and their applications will be widely introduced, and the future prospects will be discussed.
Workshop organizers
Workshop date: TBD
A lot of research developments have been done in nuclear medicine physics, but the way to clinical realization is not always straightforward. Why does this happen? What are factors that determine a successful breakthrough? Intuitively, the more innovative an idea is, the longer the route to its realization will be. However findings in physics and engineering applicable in medical fields are meaningful before the final long awaited outcome is handed to physicians. What are the roles of academia and public research institutions along the route? What are the roles of industry? How can technologies be transferred effectively from academia to industry? In this workshop, we will consider some keys to realize innovative ideas by introducing successful and on-going challenges in moving from the lab bench to clinical practice in nuclear medicine. Not only devices and software will be presented, but also topics in some radiopharmaceuticals will be introduced. Anyone who is interested in research and development of medical equipment as well as physicians who are expecting realization of the state-of-the art technologies are welcome to join.
Workshop organizers
Workshop date: Sunday 17 October 2021 (TBC)
Neutrinos are elementary particles that are considered to be deeply related to the creation of matter and the annihilation of antimatter in the early universe. For the precise measurement of the neutrino oscillation that is one of the most important phenomena, the large-scale projects with the giant detectors and high intensity neutrino beams produced from the proton accelerators are in progress.
Workshop of ‘advanced technologies for future large-scale neutrino experiments’ will review the core technologies in the future projects. The workshop starts from introduction to the neutrino physics and future projects, followed by the focused talks on the technological topics, such as the high intensity accelerator and the control and monitoring systems, development of the high performance and high pressure tolerant photosensors, electronics and data acquisition systems in the giant detectors, and the development of large-scale tracking detector using liquid argon. The goals of the workshop are to introduce the new technologies which are essential to realize the future projects and to facilitate the discussion for further improvements and idea of new experimental project based on the technologies.
Workshop organizers
Workshop date: Sunday 17 October 2021 (TBC)
Quantum technology, such as quantum computer, attracts much attention in recent years. In nuclear medicine, PET and SPECT are powerful and highly sensitive imaging and MRI provides accurate morphological and functional information. Vigorous utilization of quantum aspect may bring further higher sensitivity, spatial resolution and enable novel principle in the field of biomedical imaging and sensing. In this workshop, possibility of biomedical applications inspired by quantum technology will be discussed. The topics could include, dynamic nuclear polarization, solid state quantum sensor like nitrogen vacancy center, quantum sensing using cascade multi photons, quantum entanglement in PET, laser assisted radiation or radionuclide detection, applications of advanced quantum beam source, and more.
Workshop organizers
Workshop date: Sunday 17 October 2021 (TBC)
Positron emission tomography (PET) in vivo visualizes the molecular pathway and is the most sensitive molecular imaging modality routinely applied in clinic.
Recent developments in PET technology dramatically increased the effective sensitivity by increasing the geometric coverage leading to total-body PET imaging. It has a number of ground-breaking properties including ultra-high sensitivity, ultra-large field of view (FoV) and the opportunity for ultra-fast scanning, which enables a tailor-made solution for more convenient and safer clinical practice, medical research and drug screening. Two commercially available long-axial FoV PET/CT systems are introduced into the market by United Imaging and Siemens Healthineers. Several alternative implementations are in active development.
Despite the advantage of total-body PET, the ultra-large FoV with tremendous numbers of detectors introduces new challenges to image reconstruction. This workshop will provide an in-depth discussion of these new challenges and an overview of the frontlines of developments.
Furthermore, the workshop will kick-off a challenge by launching a first benchmark dataset to tackle the technical challenges in total-body PET reconstruction. A brief tutorial about the challenge will be given during the workshop.
Workshop organizers