Dear visitor

welcome to my academic profile and blog site, where I hope you find interesting material to stimulate your curiosity in the exciting fields of Positron Emission Tomography, Medical Image Reconstruction, Quantitative 4D Analysis and their clinical applications in oncology, cardiology and neurology. I am Nicolas Karakatsanis, currently Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Radiology at Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University in New York city, NY. In this blog I will be sharing with you the latest results and conclusions from our research studies, as published in scientific journals or announced in international meetings and conferences.

I was born and grew up in the historic city of Athens, Greece, where I completed my high school education at the summer of 2000. On the fall of the same year, I was admitted at the highly competitive 5-year joint Bachelor and Masters in Engineering education program of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens with a strong vision to apply computer engineering principles for the advancement of medicine. I graduated on fall of 2005 after successfully completing with honors my diploma thesis in the specialty of Biomedical Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Konstantina S. Nikita.

Later I was enrolled in the PhD in Biomedical Engineering graduate studies program of the same school and became member of the Biomedical Simulations and Imaging Technologies Laboratory (BIOSIM) under the supervision of Prof. Konstantina Nikita.
Meanwhile, I devoted one year as a Visiting Scholar at the Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging of University of California at Los Angeles, where I had the opportunity to actively contribute to front-end preclinical research projects in the area of molecular imaging and instrumentation (P.I. Arion F. Chatziioannou). I successfully completed my PhD dissertation in the field of nuclear medical imaging and Monte Carlo simulations on  Dec. 2010.

During the last year of my PhD, I was enrolled in the Greek army for a 9-month military service, a mandatory obligation for all eligible Greek males. During my service, I was trained in medical information technology and data security field in the Military Informatics Corps of the Hellenic Army forces.

Later, on February 2011 I joined as a postdoctoral research fellow the Division of Nuclear Medicine, at the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences, at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Maryland, USA. For the next three years, I had the opportunity under the mentorship of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Arman Rahmim at the Emission Tomography Image Reconstruction and Analyis (ETIRA) lab to lead the first developments of a set of novel whole-body dynamic PET/CT imaging methods, that have now been advanced to permit their extensive adoption in nuclear medicine clinic.

At the end of 2013, I accepted the generous offer for a post-doctoral research associate position by Dr Habib Zaidi at the Division of Nuclear Medicine of the Geneva University Hospital to continue my on-going projects and expand the pilot clinical study into Europe as well. Thanks to the support of the division and the fruitful interactions with my colleagues, I led  the development of a wide spectrum of medical imaging research projects at the PET Instrumentation and Neuroimaging laboratory (PINlab) at Geneva University Hospital, while maintaining a close collaboration with Dr Arman Rahmim lab at Johns Hopkins University. In particular, during my 2 year term in Geneva, I coordinated a range of quantitative oncological imaging projects in nuclear medicine, mainly in the area of PET tracer kinetic modeling, dynamic Time-of-Flight (TOF) acquisition clinical protocol optimization, 4D parametric reconstruction as well as motion compensation and resolution modeling techniques.

Subsequently, in summer 2015 I accepted the challenge to return with family back to USA to enroll as a senior research scientist at the Cardiovascular Imaging Lab of the Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute (TMII) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. There, I was granted the opportunity to lead a set of front-end translational molecular imaging research projects in the areas of cardiovascular PET/MRI and oncologic WB parametric PET/CT, together with TMII director, Prof. Zahi A. Fayad, and colleagues.

Two years later, on summer of 2017 I was appointed Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Department of Radiology at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University in New York, NY. My major application field currently focuses on PET quantification imaging studies utilizing anatomical and additional functional information primarily from MRI and CT. The scope of my currently funded projects includes the enhancement of early diagnosis and prognosis of cardiovascular and whole-body oncology diseases as well as evaluation of the physiological attributes of multiple radiopharmaceutical tracers by developing truly multi-parametric PET/CT and PET/MR imaging studies.

My vision is driven by the desire to investigate and develop front-end nuclear medical imaging methods enabling a) the direct translation of the quantitative benefits of multi-parametric 4D PET imaging methods to the nuclear medicine clinic as well as b) the transfer of acquired knowledge and expertise to fellow trainee scientists and students through academic mentoring and guidance.

Sincerely yours,
Nicolas

Nicolas A. Karakatsanis, PhD, DABSNM 
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering in Radiology
Weill Cornell Medical College

Weill Cornell Medicine 
Division of Radiopharmaceutical Sciences, Department of Radiology
515 East 71st Street, S-120, New York, NY 10021
nak2032@med.cornell.edu