Research Abstract

My major areas of research interest are MR imaging of the pelvis (specifically Prostate cancer) and image-guided therapy. As co-PI of the NCIGT I along with Ferenc Jolesz lead this team and direct the AMIGO facility. My lab is dedicated to prostate cancer imaging as it relates to diagnosis, staging, treatment monitoring and Image-guided Therapy (IGT). We have program in MR guided prostate biopsies for diagnosis and treatment monitoring. I lead several prospective trials involving clinical prostate multi-parametric prostate MR at 3.0T with an endorectal coil. Our lab works in all aspects from acquisition and optimization of multi-parametric 3T imaging, image processing, registration, and segmentation, navigation and image display. We are also working on many engineering challenges associated with guidance and access to the prostate. We have a program in enabling technologies, including robotics for MR guided interventions and MR guided Focused Ultrasound surgery(FUS). The latter is a major interest of our program at NCIGT and specifically in prostate cancer. We established MR guided in bore prostate biopsies for cancer diagnosis in 1997, sicne then have migrated this program to our wide-bore 3T MR and perform MR targeted and guided prostate biopsies in large cohorts of patients. Our research also involves MR image-guided focal therapyfor localized prostate cancer- MR guided cryotherapy or MR guided FUS, radiation delivery-namely EBRT and brachytherapy. We are involved in multi-disciplinary trials with colleagues in Oncology, Urology and Radiation Oncology and also national multi-center groups such as ACRIN.