Combining medical imaging technologies, says Ge Wang, director of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's Center for Biomedical Imaging, Blacksburg, VA, could provide improved early disease screening, cancer staging, therapeutic assessment, and other aspects of personalized medicine.
"The holy grail of biomedical imaging is an integrated system capable of producing tomographic, simultaneous, dynamic observations of highly complex biological phenomena in vivo," Wang said. He explained that integrating multiple major tomographic scanners into a single framework of many imaging modalities is known as "omni-tomography."
Currently, dual-modality imaging such as a positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging (PET/MRI) is a powerful example of hybrid technology. But recently, he and his colleagues became interested in going beyond dual-mode imaging, and found that "omni-tomography," the integration of multiple major scanners including single-photon emission computed tomography, MRI, and phase-contrast tomography, can be operated in parallel, achieving space and time synchrony and lead to a greatly reduced radiation dose.
The potential clinical applications for omni-tomography may improve personalized medicine. "Omni-tomography is a promising direction for biomedical imaging and systems biomedicine," Wang says.
