Blog: What Receiving The Christopher J. Thompson Award Means To Me
Ekaterina Shanina is a graduate student who received the 2024 Christopher J. Thompson Best Student Paper Award, which recognizes top technical papers where students are the principal or sole authors, at the IEEE Medical Imaging Conference. We reached out to Shanina so that she could share her thoughts on the award and her experience as a first-time conference presenter.
My name is Ekaterina Shanina, and I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Biomedical Engineering. I have been at UC Davis since 2021, where I am advised by Distinguished Professor Simon R. Cherry and Professor Jinyi Qi. My research involves developing instrumentation for high-resolution neuroimaging with positron emission tomography, or PET, a noninvasive technique for assessing how well organs and tissues are functioning in the body.
A few weeks ago, I got a chance to attend the 2024 IEEE Medical Imaging Conference, which took place in Tampa, Florida, to present my work. This is one of the more technical conferences that brings together a large and diverse international community of radiation detector and nuclear imaging scientists. It was my first time attending this conference and my first oral presentation at a conference, so I felt excited but also nervous.
My work involves a new kind of phantom for PET. A phantom is an object of known properties used to evaluate medical imaging scanners. Typically, PET phantoms are objects with cavities that are filled with a radioactive solution. However, our phantom, named PICASSO, involves a new approach inspired by light painting photography. Using a sealed radioactive point source and a robotic arm, we can collect one large dataset and computationally process it to efficiently generate various images without dealing with liquid radioactive solutions or proprietary and costly phantoms.
I am happy that my work was well-received and generated a fair bit of excitement, with several people suggesting ideas and future applications of this technology. I was honored to receive the 2024 Christopher J. Thompson Best Student Paper Award. This highly prestigious award recognizes top technical papers where students are the principal or sole authors.
Of course, this result wouldn’t have been possible without the support and encouragement from my advisors and our great Physics and Engineering in Medical Imaging team (comprised of professors, trainees and research scientists across disciplines like biomedical engineering, neurology, radiology and more), whose scientific and personal contributions have been invaluable in my research journey so far.
With the broader scientific community recognizing the promise of my work, I am inspired and excited to continue working on this project and make my small contribution to nuclear medicine science.
