| Suleman
Surti, Research Assistant Professor of Radiology at the University
of Pennsylvania, received the 2006 Medical Imaging Science Young
Investigator Award at the annual IEEE NPSS Nuclear Science Symposium
and Medical Imaging Conference meeting on November 3rd, 2006. The
award citation was “For contributions to PET instrumentation
design and quantification of imaging performance.” He was
nominated by Joel S. Karp, his mentor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr Surti received a BA in physics from Ohio Wesleyan University
in 1994, followed by a PhD in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania
in 2000. From then until his faculty appointment in 2003 he was
a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Radiology.
From his nomination letter by Professor Karp:
Suleman Surti is an outstanding scientist who has made significant
contributions to the design and development of high performance
PET instruments and to our understanding of PET imaging performance.
His computer modeling has helped to design several instruments for
both human and animal scanning, and to guide the development of
techniques to improve both image quality and accuracy of quantification.
He translated concepts of Anger-logic continuous detectors to pixelated
Anger-logic detectors, leading to detectors based on NaI(Tl), GSO,
LYSO, and LaBr3. The pixelated Anger-logic detector with a continuous
light-guide achieves a combination of high spatial resolution with
uniform light collection, thus good energy resolution and timing
resolution.
Suleman has also developed a comprehensive simulation package for
PET scanner design, starting from basic detection concepts and incorporating
both physical effects and scanner effects. In this way he has been
able to guide the development of the system and help optimize its
operation. He has used the comparison of simulated and measured
data to assess imaging performance and to correlate intrinsic scanner
performance with clinically relevant measures of image quality.
Suleman’s work has had a large impact on the development of
lanthanum bromide detectors and a time-of-flight PET scanner. The
scanner design takes advantage of his modeling of pixelated detectors,
with additional emphasis on both energy and timing resolution, and
his modeling of PET systems. The development of clinically relevant
and task-oriented measures of performance helped guide the overall
design of the scanner and helped validate the data processing (scatter
correction) and image reconstruction (fully 3D list-mode reconstruction).
The relevance of this work for clinical imaging is very high given
the recent introduction of commercial TOF PET systems.
Suleman Surti can be reached at the University of Pennsylvania,
Department of Radiology, 3400 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104;
Phone: +1 215-662-7214. E-mail: surti@mail.med.upenn.edu
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