Medical Imaging

The core seminar of this FIG is a problem-based-learning course entitled “The Medical Imaging of Disease.” The interdisciplinary nature of medical imaging will serve as a vehicle to fully understand the concepts presented in class. Position-emission tomography (PET) is an imaging technique that lends itself to detailed discussions of human metabolism and chemistry to design PET probes. Some basic differential calculus is also central to understanding radioactive half-lives in PET. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound imaging problems will be used in the class to demonstrate the interplay between physics and chemistry that is required to generate the images. Students will be given hypothetical clinical scenarios, asked to choose a technique to image the disease, and then asked to justify their answers. Case-based learning gives students an opportunity for rich discussions of the underlying physics of each technique and how it relates to biology. As the first medical imaging method to be developed, x-ray imaging will be used to present a basis for comparison for all other techniques. From this basis students will have an opportunity to discuss broad issues such as, “If you image the same part of the body using each technique, do the images look different? How specifically do they differ visually? Does each method provide different pieces of information?”