Youngho Seo
Youngho Seo is a Professor and Director of Nuclear Imaging Physics in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Program Director of MS in Biomedical Imaging graduate program, Faculty at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, Program Member of the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at UC, Berkeley, Faculty of UC Berkeley - UCSF Bioengineering Graduate Program, and Physicist Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
He received his bachelor's degree in Physics from KAIST where he investigated radiation effects on satellite-borne instruments by cosmic ray as his senior thesis research project. He completed a master's degree in Physics at University of Alabama in Huntsville, focusing on modeling ion transport by soft-electron precipitation in high-latitude ionosphere. He spent one year at UC, Irvine as a medical physics graduate student before moving to UCLA where he obtained his second master's degree and PhD in Physics with the dissertation on a dark matter experiment using dual-phase xenon. He spent another year for postdoctoral training at UCLA in experimental neutrino physics using liquid argon. Dr. Seo joined the UCSF Physics Research Laboratory (PRL) in 2003, and was trained in medical imaging physics before joining the faculty in 2006. Dr. Seo has been Director of UCSF PRL since 2008.
His primary research focus is to use and develop quantitative ionizing radiation imaging tools for a broad range of biomedical applications. He published over 200 peer-reviewed journal manuscripts, most of which focus on quantitative imaging instrumentation development and applications.
Abstract Dr. Seo Lectures:
Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is an important radionuclide imaging technology in medicine with a large range of molecularly targeted radiopharmaceuticals available. Dr. Seo will provide reviews for the historical development of gamma cameras that are the technological bases for SPECT imaging, and present state-of-the-art instrumentation developments for modern applications of SPECT including imaging therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals (i.e., theranostics).
An emerging application of nuclear imaging is dose calculations of therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals (i.e., beta emitters, alpha emitters, and Auger/conversion electron emitters) using quantitative SPECT or positron emission tomography (PET). Imaging-based dosimetry is possible and can hold great promise for precision medicine in radiotheranostics. I will show how to ensure quantitativeness of SPECT and PET imaging, dose calculation methods and biological impacts of different types of radiation, and state-of-the-art development of imaging instrumentation and dosimetry techniques.
