Research Areas

Zheng Gu’s research focuses on the design, development and optimization of instrumentation and methodologies for high resolution, high sensitivity, quantitative in-vivo preclinical positron emission tomography (PET) imaging.

Highlights 

Zheng Gu received the Bachelor’s degree at Tsinghua University in 2008, and received the PhD degree at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2014. From 2014 to 2020, Zheng Gu was a Postdoctoral Researcher, Associate Project Scientist, and Project Scientist in the Imaging Science Lab at UCLA. Zheng Gu was the key contributor to the PETbox4 and the HiPET projects, which created two high performance prototype preclinical PET tomographs. Zheng Gu was the key inventor for the novel multi-resolution detector technology used in the HiPET project (United States Patent US 10,234,572 B2).

From 2015 to 2020, Zheng Gu also worked as a senior imaging scientist for Sofie, Inc, where Zheng Gu contributed to the translation of the PETbox4 and HiPET technologies to Sofie’s three commercial product lines (G4 PET/X-RAY, G8 PET/CT and GNEXT PET/CT scanners). Over the past decade more than 60 units G4, G8 and GNEXT scanners have been installed worldwide, and researchers have published over 100 scientific papers with images and data acquired from these scanners.

(a) A photograph of the entire PETbox4 bench top prototype PET system; (b) The commercial scanner G8 PET/CT by Sofie Biosciences, Inc. translated from the PETbox4 technologies.

(a) Photograph of the HiPET system installed at the Preclinical Imaging Technology Center at UCLA; (b) The commercial scanner GNEXT PET/CT by Sofie Biosciences, Inc. translated from the HiPET technologies.

Honors

• 2005~2006   First Prize of Excellent Academic Performance Scholarship, Tsinghua University

• 2006~2007   Prize of Comprehensive Excellence Scholarship, Tsinghua University

• 2009~2010   UCLA Chancellor’s Prize

• 2010   UCLA Molecular and Medical Pharmacology Travel Award

• 2013~2014   Graduate Division Unrestricted Fellowship

Selected Publications

1. Gu Z, Taschereau R, Vu N, Prout D L, Lee J and Chatziioannou A F, 2020 Performance evaluation of HiPET, a high sensitivity and high resolution preclinical PET tomograph, Physics in Medicine and Biology, 65 045009.

2. Gu Z, Taschereau R, Vu N, Prout D L, Silverman R W, Lee J and Chatziioannou A F, 2019 Performance evaluation of G8, a high sensitivity benchtop preclinical PET/CT tomograph, The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, vol. 60, pp. 142-9.

3. Gu Z, Prout D L, Taschereau R, Bai B and Chatziioannou A F, 2016 A New Pulse Pileup Rejection Method Based on Position Shift Identification, IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, vol. 63, pp. 22-9.

4. Gu Z, Prout D L, Silverman R W, Herman H, Dooraghi A and Chatziioannou A F, 2015 A DOI Detector With Crystal Scatter Identification Capability for High Sensitivity and High Spatial Resolution PET Imaging IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science vol. 62, pp. 740-7.

5. Gu Z, Taschereau R, Vu N T, Wang H, Prout D L, Silverman R W, Bai B, Stout D B, Phelps M E and Chatziioannou A F 2013 NEMA NU-4 performance evaluation of PETbox4, a high sensitivity dedicated PET preclinical tomograph Physics in Medicine and Biology 58 3791-814.