Meet the P.I.
Jaewon Yang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Radiology, UT Southwestern
214-648-7755
Email
UT Southwestern Profile
Dr. Yang's professional research career started in the department of radiation oncology at Stanford University and transferred to the radiology department at UCSF. Throughout his professional research career, Dr. Yang has worked extensively in developing novel and clinically applicable radionuclide (PET and SPECT) imaging techniques. At Stanford, he demonstrated the proof-of-principle for PET-guided lung tumor tracking, supported by an initial research grant from RefleXion Medical that commercialized the world first emission-guided radiotherapy system recently. At UCSF, he developed quantitative PET imaging techniques readily applicable to daily clinics and extensively experienced quantitative data analysis using PET/MR data based on collaborations with GE Healthcare, focusing on attenuation correction and motion management.
In January 2022, Dr. Yang started a faculty position at UT Southwestern (UTSW). He is very excited about this move which provides much more independence and additional resources to conduct translational research. His particular research interest is, but not limited to, developing practical and efficient solutions for the unmet needs of radionuclide imaging systems, overcoming their current limitations caused by long data acquisition, slow data processing and low spatial resolution.
His experience and expertise in oncological application of PET combined with CT and MRI have proven a strong asset to perform data acquisition and preprocessing for deep learning (DL) technology development. For the first time, he developed the key enabling technology of deriving attenuation and scatter corrected PET images directly from noncorrected PET images using a DL algorithm; furthermore, he demonstrated the potential of the DL algorithm for transforming noncorrected SPECT images to attenuation corrected SPECT images in the image space, as an important application for myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) in stand-alone SPECT systems not combined with a CT.
Lab Members
Hussein Akafzade, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Akafzade completed his Ph.D. in the department of physics and applied physics at University of Texas at Arlington, August 2020. His research was focused on optics and Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) sensors. Also, he investigated antireflection coatings for solar cells as well as high energy physics. As a Postdoctoral Researcher at Dr. Yang's lab, he is developing deep learning algorithms for myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) in Single Photon Emission Tomography (SPECT). He likes playing/watching soccer and learning new languages.