Dr. Negar Omidvari, Assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been recognized with the UC Davis Academic Federation Excellence in Research Award for her groundbreaking contributions to total-body PET imaging. Negar’s research focuses on using dynamic PET imaging to study the immune system, including mapping T-cell distribution in the human body. Her work has provided insights into immune response and memory, particularly in COVID-19 patients.

May is National Cancer Research Month, and nuclear scientists at UC Davis are giving doctors a tool to see patients as a whole and not just the part of their bodies making them sick. 

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Fabrication of the first ever total-body PET scanner has been completed in collaboration with our industry partners United Imaging Healthcare and SensL Technologies. The scanner has a 194 cm axial field of view for PET imaging provided by over 500 thousand detector elements. It also contains a low dose CT scanner for anatomical imaging and PET attenuation correction.

In collaboration with United Imaging Healthcare and the UC Davis department of Veterinary Medicine, the Mini-EXPLORER II small animal PET/CT scanner has been successfully installed and is currently in use at the veterinary hospital. This scanner uses the same detectors and electronics as the full human EXPLORER but has been scaled down for small animal imaging with an axial field of view of 48.4 cm.

UC Davis and the University of Sydney held a joint workshop on October 18th, 2017 to discuss methodology and computational imaging in support of the EXPLORER total-body PET scanner project.

The team at UC Davis in collaboration with Siemens Medical Solutions have recently built and evaluated a prototype PET scanner for high sensitivity and total-body imaging of non-human primates, called the mini-EXPLORER. The mini-EXPLORER was built from a decommissioned clinical PET scanner, and rearranging the components into a scanner suitable for total-body monkey imaging.