Increasing reliance on molecular imaging as a biomarker for disease progression and response to therapy dictates a need for absolute measurement standards for true quantitation. Molecular imaging techniques based on photon counting (i.e., PET and SPECT) are inherently amenable to true quantitation, but many physical and biological hurdles to reliable and consistent calibration exist. The Nuclear Medicine Project within the Radioactivity Group at NIST addresses some of these hurdles in an effort to provide the foundations for absolute quantitation in imaging.

NIST pioneered the development of long-lived calibration surrogates for short-lived radiopharmaceuticals and continues to work to bring metrological rigor to pre-clinical and clinical molecular imaging. Our work enables precision calibration of imaging devices, so that sources of bias and uncertainty in image acquisition and reconstruction can be better identified, described, and sometimes corrected. The fellow will gain experience in the principles of absolute activity measurements and traceable calibrations as they apply to nuclear medicine.

 

key words

PET/CT; Molecular imaging; Nuclear medicine; Quantitation; Multi-center trial; Radionuclide metrology; Radiopharmaceutical;

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral applicants