Junwei Du
University of California-Davis, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a scanning method that follows tiny amounts of radioactive tracer molecules inside a living body to reveal biological processes such as inflammation, receptor activity or blood flow. In mice and rats, PET lets researchers test ideas before they move to human studies.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Physics
Engineering
- Topics
positron emission tomography
small-animal PET
total-body PET
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Build a whole-body mouse PET scanner with about 0.5 mm resolution, using 128 detectors made of 0.5 mm LYSO crystal arrays (crystals that flash when hit by gamma rays) read out from both ends by silicon photomultipliers.
- Design data acquisition electronics for the 0.5 mm scanner that use signal multiplexing to reduce each detector's 40 output signals to 9, cutting cost, complexity and heat.
- Build a 72-module whole-body PET scanner for mice and rats from BGO crystals, which have almost no built-in background radiation, aiming for sensitivity above 50% for ultra-low dose imaging.
- Develop readout electronics that use Schottky diodes to block noise from silicon photomultipliers carrying no signal, plus a shared-photodetector method to identify individual crystals and improve spatial and timing resolution.
- Enable fast dynamic and MRI-compatible imaging of mouse and rat disease models, including brain imaging, aortic inflammation, therapeutic cell tracking and heart contraction.
More about the research
Current small-animal scanners are limited by two linked properties. Spatial resolution is how small a detail they can see. Sensitivity is what fraction of the emitted radiation they actually detect. The two grants each build a whole-body small-animal PET scanner that pushes one of these limits much closer to what physics allows. Both scanners are designed to be compatible with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), so they could later be placed inside an MRI machine for combined PET/MRI imaging.
Why it matters
Sharper and more sensitive small-animal PET scanners could let researchers study fine structures such as the mouse brain or small deposits in blood vessels, and use much lower tracer doses in mice and rats. Measuring low receptor levels, following injected therapeutic cells, and recording heart motion could become practical. Protocols worked out in mouse models with these scanners are meant to feed into human whole-body and brain PET studies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Negar Omidvari
University of California-Davis, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and validate a kinetic model of the T-cell–targeting tracer 18F-AraG across organs and tissue types, using dynamic total-body PET scans for more accurate measurement than standard static images.
Nathan Frank
Augustana College, IL·Physics
Develop a modular fast-neutron detector array of plastic scintillators read out by silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), compact light sensors, to locate neutron hits more precisely than paired-photomultiplier bar detectors.
Robert Van Dam
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Chemistry
Integrate in situ radiation detectors into droplet-array radiochemistry platforms to measure radioactivity at different stages of each parallel reaction.
The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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