ECE Seminar, Franz Pfeiffer

ECE Seminar, Franz Pfeiffer Professor of Physics and Medicine, Technical University Munich Faculty Host: Lei Tian Light refreshments will be available outside of PHO 339 at 10:45 am. Title: Status of X-ray Phase-Contrast and Dark-Field Imaging for Pre-Clinical and Clinical Applications Abstract: The basic principles of x-ray image formation in radiography have remained essentially unchanged since Röntgen first discovered x-rays over a hundred years ago. The conventional approach relies on x-ray attenuation as the sole source of contrast and draws exclusively on ray or geometrical optics to describe and interpret image formation. This approach ignores another, potentially more useful source of contrast, namely the phase information. Phase-contrast imaging techniques, which can be understood using wave optics rather than ray optics, offer ways to augment or complement standard attenuation contrast by incorporating phase information. This presentation will review the recent development and status of x-ray phase-contrast and dark-field imaging in general, and focus particularly on our recent efforts to evaluate x-ray phase-contrast for future clinical applications in radiography and computed tomography. A variety of experimental results will be shown that highlight the potential of this novel method for biomedical, clinical, and industrial applications. The presentation concludes with a presentation of first in-vivo results obtained with a small-animal phase-contrast CT scanner, recently developed in our lab. Speaker Bio: Professor Pfeiffer (b. 1972) conducts research on biomedical X-ray physics. The focus of this research is new imaging methods for improved early diagnosis and detailed studies of illnesses such as cancer and osteoporosis. His scientific work extends from fundamentally oriented research with high-energy X-rays in large international research centers to applied research on new concepts in medical technology. Professor Pfeiffer studied physics at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University (1999) and was awarded doctorates by the Institut Laue-Langevin (Grenoble) and the University of Saarbrücken (2003). Following subsequent positions as a post-doc in Urbana-Champaign (USA) and as a member of scientific staff at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland, 2008), he initially assumed the position of assistant professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne (2008). He was appointed to the Chair of Biomedical Physics at TUM in 2009.