Labs & Facilities
Pioneering sophisticated imaging techniques
Radiomics Lab
The USC radiomics group focuses on exploring methods of extracting quantifiable features from radiologic images. Medical images are not just pictures but are in fact data. Therefore extracting and mining quantitative information using high throughput analysis can add supplemental information to the traditionally used visual qualification.
These features can be combined with clinical,laboratory, genomic, and epigenetic data to improve identification of diagnostic and prognostic features. Radiomics data are in a mineable form that can be used to build descriptive and predictive models relating image features to phenotypes or gene-protein signatures. Our group has developed workflows and algorithms to extract hundreds of quantifiable features from standard of care medical images.
4D Quantitative Imaging Lab
USC 4D Quantitative Imaging Center at Keck offers a new service for patient care and research that provides state of the art digital image processing and quantitation. This facility at the Keck Medical Center of USC and Keck School of Medicine enables 3D and 4D (time resolved dynamic and perfusion) reconstruction of Ultrasound, CT and MR images. This application of technology provides sophisticated and quantitative evaluation of imaging data.
USC Molecular Imaging Center (MIC)
The mission of the USC Molecular Imaging Center to promote the use of imaging to: a) rapidly and effectively translate developments in cellular and molecular biology, chemistry, neurosciences, physics, computer sciences, engineering and instrumentation into improvements in cancer patient care, b) facilitate further advances in the understanding of the molecular basis of this disease, and c) train future investigators that will have the requisite multidisciplinary skills to effectively lead the expansion of molecular medical techniques.
There is an ever-increasing demand for new and more sophisticated imaging probes for experimental research and clinical application, especially with the escalation of molecular medicine approaches to therapy design. Our vision is for the USC MIC to have a comprehensive imaging program focused on the development of new radiotracers and non-radioactive biological probes for use in interdisciplinary biomedical research and imaging.