Scott D. Metzler, PhD

Description of Research Expertise

My expertise is the development, characterization, and use of instrumentation for emission tomography. In particular, I work on collimation for single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), with an emphasis on high-resolution applications, and also on collimation for positron emission tomography (PET). For SPECT, I have developed detailed models of pinhole-aperture penetration by high energy gamma rays, a limiting aspect of high-resolution applications and both sensitivity and resolution models for slit-slat collimation, which is a hybrid cross of pinhole and parallel-beam collimation that can be used for small-organ imaging in clinical applications. In the laboratory, we use helical pinhole SPECT as a method for acquiring and reconstructing artifact-free images for whole-body small-animal applications. In PET, we are developing collimation to improve spatial resolution and sampling.