Duke to Lead National Center for Virtual Imaging Trials
Ehsan Samei will direct the effort to create digital realizations of patients, imaging technologies and interpretations
Professor of Radiology, Physics, Biomedical Engineering (BME), and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ehsan Samei has secured a major new five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create the national Center for Virtual Imaging Trials (CVIT) at Duke University. The new center will create digital realizations of patients, imaging systems and image interpretations within a comprehensive virtual platform to assess the clinical performance of medical imaging technologies and applications.
“Virtual clinical trials provide a new paradigm to conduct experiments in medicine,” said Samei. “With an initial focus on CT imaging, the methodology offers an alternative to clinical trials and their limitations and will have far-reaching implications across the spectrum of imaging methods and medicine at large.”
CVIT will be hosted in the Ravin Advanced Imaging Laboratories (RAI Labs) of Duke Radiology and in addition to Samei, will be led by faculty members Paul Segars, Joseph Lo, and Maciej Mazurowski, who also share secondary appointments to Duke ECE. The new center joins a distinguished list of National Centers for Biomedical Imaging & Bioengineering, which create critical and unique technology and methods at forefront of their respective fields for a broad range of research. In joining this network, CVIT will not only develop a new way to conduct research in medicine but will also efficiently share its methods through a consortium of industry, government and academic collaborators.