BME Seminar by Dr. Arnaldo Mayer - Imaging screening of the future

BME School is glad to have Dr. Arnaldo Mayer presenting- Imaging screening of the future: the case for computationally enhanced ultra-low dose CT

Screening asymptomatic populations for the early detection of severe diseases is a pillar of preventive medicine. Medical imaging would be expected to play a major role in this arena. Yet, since the advent of mammography 50 years ago, no other imaging-based screening applications has been widely adopted worldwide.

Balancing between the advantages and inconvenient of existing imaging techniques, we propose computationally enhanced ultra-low dose CT as a convenient tool for novel population screening applications.  

In this talk, we will review two examples of screening applications recently developed by the Computational Imaging Lab (CILAB) at Sheba Medical Center: Chest CT denoising for ultra-low dose lung cancer screening, and liver fat fraction measurement in ultra-low dose abdominal CT.  The lung application, based on state-of-the-art deep denoising, has grown from the lab to become a clinical protocol, reimbursed from this year in Israel. The liver application leverages MRI as a cross-modality teacher for accurate fat measurements in ultra-low dose CT.  Besides the specific technology, we will review the impact and importance of performing the engineering research from the heart of a major university hospital.