Medical Imaging

Dr. Altbach is Professor in the Departments of Medical Imaging and Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Altbach has over 20 years of experience directing a lab that develops novel MRI technology for quantitative MRI. Her research focuses on the development of new quantitative biomarkers to assess early stages or risk of disease as well as to predict response to treatment with the goal of translating the novel technology to the clinic. To adhere to the time constraints of clinical MRI examinations, her work is based on the design of acquisition and reconstruction techniques that yield images and quantitative maps from significantly less data than conventional methods, thus improving imaging efficiency and patient comfort. Her team of basic scientists, engineers and clinicians work together with industry to optimize the novel techniques for human imaging. Dr. Altbach's work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the Arizona Biomedical Research Center and industry and technology developed in her lab is distributed worldwide. Current disease areas being investigated with the quantitative MRI technology developed in Dr. Altbach's lab are the detection and characterization of small abdominal lesions, deemed too-small-to-diagnose with current imaging modalities; early staging of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to prevent progression to liver cancer; and the characterization of the arterial wall in carotid artery disease to predict stroke.

Dr. Russell Witte, a native Tucsonan, received a BS degree with honors in physics from the University of Arizona in Tucson (1993). Following travel abroad in Europe and Brazil, he began graduate studies in bioengineering at Arizona State University. His doctoral thesis (PhD, 2002) used chronic microelectrode arrays to describe sensory coding and learning-induced plasticity in the mammalian brain. He then moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and, as a post doc in the Biomedical Ultrasonics Laboratory, developed novel hybrid imaging techniques that integrate ultrasound, light, and/or microwaves for medical applications. In 2007, Dr. Witte returned to Tucson and is now Associate Professor of Medical Imaging, Optical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Arizona. Dr. Witte’s Experimental Ultrasound and Neural Imaging Laboratory (EUNIL) devises cutting-edge imaging technology, integrating light, ultrasound and microwaves to diagnose and treat diseases ranging from chronic tendon disorders (tendinopathies) and irregular cardiac rhythms (arrhythmias) to breast cancer. By integrating different forms of energy, special effects are created that enable ultrasound imaging of optical absorption deep in tissue (photoacoustic imaging), mapping current source densities in the beating heart (acoustoelectric imaging), and elasticity imaging of human muscle and tendon for quantifying tissue mechanical properties. Dr. Witte's research further extends into nanotechnology and smart contrast agents, which have applications to functional brain imaging, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Dr. Witte works closely with collaborators in the Colleges of Engineering, Optical Sciences and Medicine, as well as industry, to develop cutting-edge imaging technologies that potentially improve patient care. Dr. Witte is also a member of the Arizona Cancer Center, Sarver Heart Center and School of Mind, Brain, and Behavior, as well as the Neuroscience, Applied Mathematics, and Biomedical Engineering graduate interdisciplinary programs (GIDPs). Dr. Witte's vision is to develop a new generation of young investigators steeped in multiple disciplines branching from neuroscience, neural engineering, biochemistry, mathematics, biomedical imaging and, physics. He welcomes dreamers, brainstormers and problems solvers to join his team in search of the next great discovery in physics and medicine. Keywords: Biomedical Engineering/Medical Imaging