New faculty presentations by Drs. Kang Wang and Sina Houshman
At our latest Body Imaging meeting, we welcomed and learned about the research interests of two new clinician-scientist faculty, Drs. Kang Wang and Sina Houshmand.
Dr. Kang Wang recently joined UCSF in the Abdominal Imaging section and spoke about “Technical development for improved access and reproducibility of MR biomarkers of chronic liver disease”. There have been many advancements in quantitative MRI for the liver, including proton density fat fraction (PDFF), T1 mapping, and MR elastography. Dr. Wang highlighted specific work using common in and out of phase MR images to compute PDFF, as opposed to more specialized sequences. He also highlighted the need to look at the entire imaging pipeline, all the way from prescription to image analysis, when assessing and improving MR biomarkers.
https://radiology.ucsf.edu/people/kang-wang
Dr. Sina Houshmand is another member of the Abdominal Imaging section and spoke about “Evaluation of Peritoneal Carcinomatosis Using 68Ga-FAP-2286 PET: Comparison with Conventional Imaging and Histology”. This ongoing study is supported a grant from the Society for Abdominal Radiology, and uses this Fibroblast Activation Protein (FAP) agent to visualize cancer-associated fibroblasts in epithelial tumors. This study include tissue sample correlations with very favorable results compared to standard-of-care CT as well as FDG-PET where there is high bowel uptake. Beyond this application, we discussed the potential for other applications such as liver, cardiac, and pulmonary fibrosis where FAP would visualize active fibroblasts where many other imaging modalities visualize the build up of collagen.