Meet the CHILI faculty
The faculty members of CHILI kindly invite you to join the Conference on Hybrid Imaging Live on October 29.
Here you can read more about each speaker.
08:30-10:15
New horizons for hybrid imaging
Thomas Beyer (Vienna, Austria)
Thomas Beyer holds a PhD in Physics and is co-developer of combined PET/CT imaging systems. He has a background in research and project management in academia and imaging industry.
Thomas graduated in Physics from the Leipzig University (Germany) and got his PhD in Medical Physics from Surrey University (UK). During his US-based studies he became involved in the development and clinical testing of the first PET/CT prototype (1992-2000) before joining Siemens/CTI PET Systems as an International PET/CT specialist.
In 2002 he became a Research Associate in Nuclear Medicine and Radiology and PET/CT project manager at Essen University Hospital (Germany). In 2006 he became Teaching Professor (Priv.-Doz.) for Experimental Nuclear Medicine at Essen, and joined timaq medical imaging Inc, a Zurich-based Imaging CRO. In 2007 Thomas moved to Philips Medical Systems as International Manager Clinical Science Nuclear Medicine. In 2008 he set up a Zurich-based consulting company for expert advise in cross-modality imaging and applications. He is appointed full professor of Physics of Medical Imaging at the Medical University of Vienna from March 2013.
Thomas is a member of various national and international Medicine organizations, a founding member of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) Physics Committee, the European Society of Hybrid Imaging (ESHI) and past Head of the New Technology working group at the Association of Imaging Producers and Equipment Suppliers (AIPES).
Irène Buvat (Orsay, France)
Irène Buvat received her PhD degree in “Particle and Nuclear Physics” from Paris Sud University, France, in 1992 and oriented her career towards applications of Nuclear Physics to Medical Imaging. She spent one year at University College London, UK, and two years at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA. In 1995, she entered the French “Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique”.
She is currently the head of the “In Vivo Molecular Imaging” research lab at the Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot PET center in Orsay, France. Her research interests focus on developing quantification methods to make the most of SPECT and PET data coupled with CT or MRI for understanding biological mechanisms or optimizing patient management. She has been the spokesperson of the worldwide OpenGATE collaboration developing the GATE Monte Carlo opensource simulation tool dedicated to emission and transmission tomography and radiotherapy applications for 10 years. She is currently largely involved in so-called radiomic approaches to further enhance the role of PET/CT and PET/MR in precision medicine. She has always been very active in training students and in knowledge and software dissemination and promotes open-access to high-standard research material.
Andrew Scott (Melbourne, Australia)
Professor Andrew Scott is a leading medical specialist, with comprehensive experience in nuclear medicine and Positron Emission Tomography (PET), and in cancer biology.
Professor Scott current positions include Director of the Department of Molecular Imaging and Therapy at Austin Health, Laboratory Head at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute, Professor in the School of Cancer Medicine at La Trobe University, and Professor in Faculty of Medicine at the University of Melbourne.
Professor Scott holds a Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery (Honours) and a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Sydney. He trained in Internal Medicine, Nuclear Medicine and Tumour Immunology in Sydney, and at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, USA, before returning to Australia to pursue his clinical and research career.
He has published over 320 peer-reviewed papers and 22 book chapters, principally in oncology and molecular imaging. Invited reviews in leading journals include Nature Reviews Cancer and Cancer Research. He is on the Editorial Boards of many high-ranking oncology and nuclear medicine journals.
Professor Scott is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, Fellow of the Australian Association of Nuclear Medicine Specialists, and Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is Chair of the Board of Cancer Trials Australia and on the Executive Board of the World Federation of Nuclear Medicine and Biology.
In 2017 Professor Scott was awarded Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia.
Throughout my research career as a translational clinician-scientist, I have had an abiding interest in the mechanisms of tumour cell growth, as well as the development of innovative strategies to improve diagnosis and therapy for cancer patients.
My major research focus areas have been in defining and characterising antigen and receptor targets for cancer therapy, signaling and metabolic pathways in cancer cells, antibody-based therapy and immune regulation of tumours, and molecular imaging of cancer.
I have developed a program to translate our laboratory discoveries to use in the clinic, which has so far led to 10 novel antibodies and recombinant proteins progressing successfully through first-in-human, Phase I and II cancer trials. This program has delivered several key outcomes, including 21 patents and the licensing of seven discoveries to Pharma and Biotech.
10:30-12:15
Oncology 1: Hybrid imaging as the standard of care
Marius Mayerhöfer (New York, USA)
Marius E. Mayerhoefer, MD, PhD, was born in Guessing, Austria. He attended medical school at the Medical University of Vienna, where he graduated in 2004. From 2006 to 2010 he did graduate research, also at the Medical University of Vienna, and attained a PhD in Medical Physics. Dr. Mayerhoefer did his residency training in Radiology in the Department of Radiology of the Medical University of Vienna at the Vienna General Hospital, and completed a scholarship in oncologic imaging at the Department of Radiology, University of Cambridge, in 2010.
Dr. Mayerhoefer has been active in research projects and has authored and co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed original research articles. His main area of expertise is oncologic imaging with PET/CT, PET/MRI, and whole-body DWI, with a focus on blood cancers, particularly lymphoma and leukemia. He has also worked in the field of Radiomics and AI for >15 years. He has presented his work at major scientific meetings across Europe, North America, and Asia.
Dr. Mayerhoefer serves on multiple editorial review boards of academic journals, such as European Radiology, Investigative Radiology, Cancers, and Cancer Imaging. He is executive board member of the European Society of Oncologic Imaging (ESOI), fellow of the International Cancer Imaging Society (ICIS), and also a member of the European Society of Radiology (ESR) and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Since 2013, Dr. Mayerhoefer is an Associate Professor of Radiology at the Medical University of Vienna, and served as Director of the Hybrid Imaging Unit until September 2019. In October 2019, he joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he serves as Director for PET/MRI and Medical Director of the Center for Integrated Metabolic Imaging (CIMI).
Helmut Prosch (Vienna, Austria)
Helmut Prosch is an Associate Professor of Radiology and section chief of thoracic imaging at the Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna. He obtained his medical degree in 2000 from the University of Vienna. Helmut Prosch trained in Radiology at the Otto Wagner Hospital in Vienna, Austria. Before, he worked as research fellow at the Children’s Cancer research institute in Vienna. His research focuses on diagnosis and staging of lung cancer and deep learning for the diagnosis of diffuse parenchymal lung diseases.
Andy Scarsbrook (Leeds, UK)
Professor Andy Scarsbrook is a dual-certified Consultant in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at St. James’s Institute of Oncology in Leeds. He is also a Professor of Radiology at the University of Leeds. Prof Scarsbrook received his specialist training in Clinical Radiology in Oxford. Subsequently he undertook a fellowship in Nuclear Medicine and PET-CT in Oxford and at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London. He has been a Consultant in Leeds since October 2006 at one of the largest imaging departments in the UK.
He is academically active and major research interests include functional and molecular imaging in oncology. Prof Scarsbrook has published extensively and lectured at national and international meetings on many aspects of PET-CT.
Marcus Unterrainer (Munich, Germany)
Marcus Unterrainer is academic radiologist and nuclear medicine physician at the Department of Radiology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Germany. He is Deputy Head of Oncologic Imaging and Head of the Dermatologic Imaging section at the Department of Radiology at the LMU Munich.
His research at LMU Munich primarily focuses on hybrid imaging and translational PET imaging using novel radioligands. Particularly, he is interested in the identification of imaging biomarkers for response prediction, individual therapy selection and therapy monitoring for novel therapies such as radioligand therapies, targeted therapies, and immuno-oncology with special emphasis on hybrid imaging.
Marcus attended medical school at LMU Munich, where he obtained his MD and PhD. Moreover, he obtained his M.Sc. in Clinical Research at Harvard University / Dresden University and his MHBA at Friedrich–Alexander University Erlangen–Nurnberg.
12:30-13:15
Symposium sponsored by Siemens Healthineers
13:30-15:15
Oncology 2: The world beyond FDG
Clemens Cyran (Munich, Germany)
Prof. Dr. Clemens Cyran is Professor of Radiology at the faculty of Medicine of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. After graduation from Medical School in Munich, Prof. Cyran assumed a position as postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Pharmaceutical and Molecular Imaging, University of California San Francisco, from 2006 to 2007 with a research focus on imaging biomarkers of therapy response in experimental oncology. Prof. Cyran completed his residency in radiology in Munich in 2013 and is also board certified in diagnostic nuclear medicine.
Between 2017 and 2019 Prof. Cyran served as vice chair of the Department of Radiology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and was section chief of the hybrid imaging department. Following a period in private practice, Prof. Cyran returned to academia in July 2020 reassuming his position as vice chair at the Department of Radiology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich.
The research focus of Prof. Cyran is the development and validation of imaging biomarkers of therapy response in oncology using multimodality hybrid imaging techniques, including MRI, multi-tracer PET and optical fluorescence imaging, with a strong translational focus. Current projects investigate methods of automated image analysis of digital molecular imaging data using artificial intelligence based algorithms as well as AI-based analytics for multidisciplinary diagnostic data in integrated diagnostics.
Harun Ilhan (Munich, Germany)
Harun Ilhan is a senior physician at the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.
He is responsible for the therapy ward, which is one of the largest nuclear medicine therapy facilities in Germany.
The spectrum covers all available therapy options in nuclear medicine including Peptide-Receptor-Radionuclide Therapy using Lutetium 177-DOTATATE and Radioligand Therapy using Lutetium 177 and Actinium 225 PSMA.
Frederik Giesel (Düsseldorf, Germany)
Professor Dr. Giesel is Chairman of the Nuclear Medicine Department at the University Hospital Düsseldorf/ GER. Alongside, he is visiting Professor at the Osaka University/ Japan. Moreover, he was invited as visiting professorship in renowned Universities such as Stanford University, USA and Yonsei University, South Korea.
Professor Giesel finished his studies in Human Medicine at the University of Mainz and Heidelberg /GER, before he went to the National Institutes of Health (NIH, Bethesda, USA) for a part of his clerkship period. The specialization (resident) began at the University Hospital Heidelberg and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) with several scientific visits to the USA (NIH and Stanford University). During his residency, he also completed a two-year executive MBA-program at the Frankfurt School of Finance/ GER including worldwide courses such as London, Dubai, Tokyo and Boston. After completing his medical residencies (board certification) and habilitation, he specializated in the field of nuclear medicine at the University Hospital Heidelberg/ GER. Furthermore, based on his close connection to the basic medical topics (pre-clinical school) Professor Giesel established the first combined series of seminars “Virtual Anatomy and Pathology” at the University of Heidelberg, the anatomy and pathology with diagnostic imaging.
Professor Giesel has published over 230 scientific works (H-Index: 51). Furthermore, he acquired over the last years over 2.5 Mio Euro in terms of research funds in the field of imaging sciences and image post processing. Currently, his main research focuses on a Phase I/II Multi-Center Study under his leadership, concerning a novel and highly effective PET-Tracer (Prostate Specific Membrane Antigen [PSMA]), which has recently been introduced into the clinical application for the diagnosis of prostate cancer. Additionally, his research contains PET imaging with the novel so-called pan tumor tracer FAPI, which has been established in cooperation with the Research Group of Prof. Haberkorn/UKHD.
Jiří Ferda (Plzeň, Czech Republic)
Prof. Jiří Ferda, M.D., Ph.D., graduated at Charles University, Medical Faculty Pilsen 1994, and holds board certifications in Radiology, Neuroradiology, Interventional Radiology and Nuclear medicine.
His professional orientation is advanced imaging using computed tomography and hybrid imaging using PET/CT and PET/MR. Currently, he is at the position of the chair of the Department of the Imaging of University Hospital Pilsen. The department runs molecular imaging suite with PET/CT and PET/MR and uses wide range of the radoopharmaceuticals labeled by fluorine and galium. The research activities target the innovative imaging with the PET/CT and PET/MRI in inflammation and sepsis, brain tumors and prostate carcinoma, and at the same time the research of the use of photon counting computed tomography. Jiri Ferda is also the president of Czech Radiolgical Society, editor in chief of Czech Radiology journal, and section head editor of Hybrid imaging of European Journal of Radiology
15:30-16:00
Value of contrast enhanced CT in hybrid imaging
Sponsored symposium by Bayer
Klaus Strobel (Lucerne, Switzerland)
Prof. Strobel ist dual board certified in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine and currently head of Nuclear Medicine at Cantonal Hospital Lucerne, Switzerland. He reports on hybrid imaging studies since 2004 daily. For the last five years he was vice president of the bone & joint committee of the EANM. His main research interest is hybrid imaging, especially bone and joint SPECT/CT in orthopedic applications. He served as teacher for ESMIT courses and IDKD Davos.
16:15-18:00
Infection and Inflammation
Mona-Elisabeth Revheim (Oslo, Norway)
Dr. Mona-Elisabeth Revheim, PhD, MHA is chief physician at the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Head of the research group Functional and Molecular Imaging and Treatment at the Division of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Oslo University Hospital, Norway and Associated Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway. She was visiting professor at the Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania in 2019.
Her main research interest has been medical imaging with particular focus on detection of disease and prediction and monitoring of treatment response in both oncology and inflammatory diseases, as well as technical developments in PET/CT and studies with the use of novel tracers. A key activity since the beginning of her career has been to compare different functional and molecular imaging modalities with histological findings and clinical outcome. Lately, her research activity also covers the development of molecular radiotherapies with a strong translational focus.
Dr. Revheim has also a strong commitment to the use of quality management systems, certification and accreditation of equipment and clinical practice (ISO 9001 standard, EANM, EANM Research Ltd (EARL). She believes that quality assurance work and research can be closely related, and through standardisation and well-functioning quality systems and registries, knowledge on more efficient delivery of high quality health care can be obtained.
Dr. Revheim is a member of various national and international Medicine organizations and has published and lectured at national and international meetings on many aspects of hybrid imaging. She has served as the president of The Norwegian Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging and is currently Head of the regional Resident Program for Nuclear Medicine.
José L. Vercher-Conejero (Barcelona, Spain)
Dr José L Vercher-Conejero is a nuclear medicine physician in the Department of Nuclear Medicine/PET Unit at the University Hospital of Bellvitge (Barcelona, Spain). During his training period, for his merits he was awarded a scholarship by the Official College of Physicians of Valencia and invited by the Mount Sinai Medical Hospital of New York to perform a rotation in the Department of Radiology.
He has been working at the University and Polytechnic Hospital La Fe in Valencia (Department of Nuclear Medicine – Clinical Area of Medical Imaging), being also a member of the “Biomedical and Imaging Research Group – (GIBI230)”, and carried out a fellowship in the Department of Radiology at UH Hospital/Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (Ohio, USA), specializing in PET/MRI and digital PET mainly.
His interests are in oncological PET/CT, PET/MR, SPECT/CT, FDG and Non-FDG radiopharmaceuticals, and radiometabolic therapy (PRRT for NETs, endocrine disorders and endocrine oncology, treatment of bone metastases, microspheres with Y-90 for the treatment of intrahepatic tumour lesions, among others).
From March 2019, Dr Vercher-Conejero is the Hybrid Imaging Ambassador for Spain for the European Society for Hybrid, Molecular and Translational Imaging (ESHIMT).
Michel Eisenblätter (Freiburg, Germany)
Dr Michel Eisenblätter is an academic radiologist at the University of Freiburg Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany. He is Head of Oncologic Imaging at the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology and head of the Translational Cancer Diagnostics Research Group.
Michel’s preclinical research group, partly based at the University of Münster Translational Research Imaging Center, is working on targeted imaging approaches for visualisation of tumour-immune interaction and mechanisms of premetastatic tissue priming.
His clinical research group in Freiburg concentrates on the identification of imaging biomarkers for patient selection and therapy monitoring for novel, targeted therapies and immunetherapy in CT, MRI and hybrid imaging. In multivariate analyses, they specifically screen for integrated parameter patterns, including imaging data as well as proteomic and genomic information from tissue samples or liquid biopsy.
Michel attended medical school in Münster, Germany and later joined the King’s College London Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering and the Richard Dimbleby Department of Cancer Research as an MRC Clinical Research Fellow. He obtained his MD from University of Münster and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from King’s College London.
Manil Subesinghe (London, UK)
Manil Subesinghe in a clinical lecturer in PET imaging at King’s College London and honorary consultant radiologist at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. He completed clinical radiology training in West Yorkshire, followed by a 1 year PET-CT fellowship in Leeds. He was appointed as a consultant radiologist in Oxford in 2014 and then to his current post at King’s College London in 2017. His research interests include the role of functional and molecular imaging in cancer and has published on these topics. He has lectured at regional and national meetings on various aspects of PET-CT in oncology. He is a member of both the Clinical Radiology Professional and Learning Development Committee (PLD) of the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) and RCR radiology events and learning (REAL) committee.