(she/her/hers)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
nuclear medicine, molecular imaging, SPECT instrumentation, semiconductor detectors
Dr. Elena Maria Zannoni is a postdoctoral research associate at the Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), working in Prof. Ling-Jian Meng's Radiation and Detection Imaging Lab. Elena received with honors a B.Sc. degree (2013) and a M.S. degree (2015) in Biomedical Engineering from University of Pisa, Italy. She earned a Ph.D. in Bioengineering at UIUC in 2021. Her research focuses on the development of advanced nuclear medicine imaging systems based on state-of-art semiconductor detectors and collimator designs for which she holds a patent. For her Ph.D. she designed, developed, and characterized a preclinical SPECT system, in collaboration with University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Currently, she is involved in the development of two clinical nuclear medicine imaging systems: the Dynamic Extremity SPECT system for imaging peripheral vascular disease in lower extremities, in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, and the AlphaSPECT system, a full-body SPECT system for targeted alpha therapy applications, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University.
Elena has presented her research in many national and international conferences, authoring and co-authoring 40+ presentations and workshops. She received several grants from the IEEE Women in Engineering Society and the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society, including twice the Valentin T. Jordanov Radiation Instrumentation Award. Elena won the first place in the IEEE Student Paper Award competition during the 2017 IEEE Medical Imaging Conference in Atlanta (USA), the third place in the same competition the following year in Sydney (AUS), and the first place in the Physics, Instrumentation and Data Sciences Council Young Investigation Award at the 2021 SNMMI Annual Meeting. In 2022, she was awarded the IEEE NPSS Edward J. Hoffman Early Career Development Grant, intended to support the career development of outstanding early-career researchers who have the potential to transform the field of medical imaging.
Pushing the Forefront of High-Performance Nuclear Medicine Imaging and Instrumentation
Molecular Imaging is a well-established diagnostic imaging discipline that enables the visualization, characterization, and quantification of biological processes taking place at the cellular and subcellular levels within intact living subjects. Since any pathology begins with cell changes at the microscopic and molecular level, molecular imaging has the potential to identify disease in an earlier and more treatable stage, when usually other conventional imaging modalities or tests are not able to reveal underlying abnormalities. In nuclear medicine, which is a branch of molecular imaging, small amounts of radioactive materials (or tracers) are used to diagnose and treat a variety of diseases providing useful metabolic information. In clinical and preclinical practice, the leading nuclear medicine imaging approaches are radionuclide-based emission tomographic techniques, known as positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT).
While nuclear imaging techniques have the potentials to change the treatment planning and disease monitoring, and several radiotracers are readily available in clinics, their success has been limited due to the lack of specialized and high-performance imaging instrumentation, still mainly based on not-optimized geometries and cumbersome scintillation detectors, characterized by poor spectral and spatial resolution. As the demand of high-performance nuclear medicine instrumentation continues to rise, my research focuses on: (a) developing high-energy radiation sensors and readout electronics for nuclear medical imaging instrumentation; (b) conceiving innovative system geometries and advanced image formation techniques to improve the performance of medical imaging systems; (c) exploring hyperspectral imaging techniques that utilize a broad range of electromagnetic radiations (from soft x-rays to energetic gamma rays and alpha particles) for visualizing physiological processes inside biological samples, living animals and patients. I will present in detail the design, development and applications of two hyperspectral SPECT imaging systems: the AlphaSPECTmini, a state-of-the-art small-animal imaging system, and the Dynamic Extremity (DE-)SPECT, an organ-dedicated SPECT scanner for imaging lower extremities in patients suffering of peripheral vascular diseases.