August 2025 – Dr. Guobao Wang and his collaborators at UC Davis have secured a $2.5 million NIH grant to advance a novel hybrid imaging technique combining PET and dual- energy CT, promising better detection of cancer, bone, and heart diseases.
The four-year funding supports PET-enabled Dual-Energy CT, which uses PET data to generate high-energy CT images alongside the standard ones, revealing tissue composition without extra radiation or new CT hardware which is normally required for dual-energy CT imaging.
A paper in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging by Yansong Zhu et al. last year showcased this breakthrough using the innovative EXPLORER total- body PET scanner, proving its real-world potential
This new method could enable sharper distinction between healthy and cancerous tissues and enhance treatment response monitoring in a single scan. The method could also improve bone marrow images and offers new insights into heart disease such as inflammation. With refinement and fine tuning, this method could make advanced imaging more accessible worldwide without costly upgrades.