If you ever get asked PET-CT (positron emission tomography) scanthose. high-precision tomography, recommended mainly for detection of neoplasms but also neurodegenerative or cardiovascular damageremember that the Greek scientist made a decisive contribution to the impressive progress of the technology in question.

This is a 41 year old Nikola KarakatsaniAssociate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Radiology at Cornell University School of Medicine and Visiting Professor of Radiology at Mount Sinai Medical School, who was recently awarded international scientific award “Hal O’Brien Rising Star Award 2023” as Leading Emerging Scientist in Nuclear Medicine for 2023.

The award is presented annually by the Education and Research Foundation (ERF), based in the United States. Mr. Karakatsanis was selected among other candidates due to his published research work and mainly due to the development of innovative methods for 4D dynamic full body PET imaging.

His path began with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. NTU. He then completed his PhD at NTUA in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied for one semester. “From a very early age, I made it clear to myself that I wanted to build my career around biomedical engineering, telecommunications and computer science,” Mr. Karakatsanis recalls today. “Last year, two events determined my final choice. to delve deeper into biomedical imaging – our faculty trip to research centers in New York and Boston in 2005 and my visit to the Biomedical Simulation and Imaging Laboratory.” There, young Karakatsanis gets acquainted with the field of computer modeling, interaction of radiation and technology of visualization systems.

PET imaging was invented in the 70s, developed in the 80s for clinical use, since the 90s it has become fully 3D, and around 2000 the first hybrid scanners appeared, combining PET with CT for even more accurate results.

“In a whole body PET scan, we wait about an hour after an intravenous dose to allow the radioactive material to gradually build up in the bloodstream in the tissues of interest before imaging; then we position the subject horizontally and collect the emitted radiation for 2-5 minutes on one side of the body that we want to examine. The scanner then automatically moves the examination bed in one direction and repeats the process until the entire body is covered,” he describes. At the end of the study, which takes a total of 10-20 minutes, “the images are stitched together to obtain a static whole-body PET image that shows us the average distribution of the substance in the body in one image over time.” He himself, as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University (2011-2014) and the University of Geneva (2014-2015), developed a 4D whole body examination in order to obtain many dynamic images of the whole body at the same time. instead of a static image, which frame-by-frame depict some of the time stages of absorption of a substance by tissues. Thus, the clinician can see not only the amount of absorbed substance in the tissues at one time, but also the rate of its absorption for the purpose of more accurate diagnosis, such as, for example. the most effective distinction between benign and malignant neoplasms. Whole body PET was invented in 2018, which can perform dynamic full body PET examination in a simpler way and with greater clarity, but costs more than 10 million euros compared to conventional clinical PET scanners, which cost between 2 and 4 million euros. .

Dispute

The researcher’s next bet is to make dynamic full-body PET accessible to all patients and easy to use for physicians, and to evaluate its usefulness for more diseases. “My work aims to develop more affordable whole body PET scanners using ‘smart’ sparse detector arrays to significantly reduce their manufacturing costs,” he emphasizes, “and to confirm the applicability of PET examination also for other substances — radiopharmaceuticals, in addition to glucose. 18F-FDG, which will improve diagnosis and treatment monitoring for more diseases.”