GUO, Hua-School of Medicine, Tsinghua University

Medical Imaging

GUO, Hua

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Hua Guo, Ph.D., is a tenured associate professor at Center for Biomedical Imaging Research, Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his Ph.D. from the department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University in 2006. He was on the faculty of Medical Center of New York University from 2008 to 2010 and worked on MR angiography. Before that he once worked in Siemens as a scientist and at the University of Hong Kong as a postdoc. He joined Tsinghua University in 2010 and helped build Center for Biomedical Imaging Research. The primary research of Dr. Guo’s lab is focused on two core areas in MRI. One is MRI physics including novel sequence design and image reconstruction, which can potentially provide high spatiotemporal resolution and multi-parametric quantitative imaging. Particularly, he and his team are working on advanced diffusion weighted imaging including resolution and fidelity improvement. Recently he and his team also work on microstructural information quantification using DWI. The other area is the translational applications of advanced MRI techniques for accurate diagnosis and disease management. In particular, he worked with industry closely to develop MRI-guided laser interstitial thermometry techniques. He has strong interest in cost effective MRI by developing new signal sampling strategies, optimizing low cost MRI hardware and using AI assisted MRI techniques. Dr. Guo has been serving on the editorial board of several scientific journals and is an active reviewer for more than 10 MRI related journals. He has published more than 90 peer-reviewed journal papers and more than 200 conference abstracts. He was the Member of the Annual Meeting Program Committee (AMPC) of the ISMRM from 2017 to 2020. Now he serves in the editorial board of MRM journal.

MRI plays a key role in clinical disease diagnosis and life science research. Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) is one of the most important imaging techniques in MRI. It has been widely used in clinics for diagnosis and in neuroimaging for fiber tracking and microstructure mapping. To detect micro-scale random motion of water molecules in DWI, single-shot EPI is widely used for signal acquisition due to its high acquisition speed and motion insensitivity. However, it suffers from the problems of low-resolution, geometric distortion and image blurring due to its low bandwidth along the phase-encoding direction and significant T2* decay during the EPI readout.

Dr. Guo and his team have been systematically developing a series of DWI methods to suppress or remove image distortion, increase in-plane and through-plane resolution, boost sampling efficiency and improve the new methods’ practicability. In particular, when reconstructing multi-shot diffusion images, phase variations are not treated as a source of imaging artifacts, but as a kind of image encoding. Similarly, field inhomogeneity induced phase can also be used for signal encoding. With these new reconstruction theories, signals can be significantly saved while image quality can be well maintained. By taking advantage of improved image quality, Dr. Guo is working on advanced fiber tracking algorithms and micro-structural information quantification now.

Dr. Guo is also interested in translational studies. Part of his techniques have been adopted by domestic MRI companies. At present, he and his team are working with companies clsoely to develop new interventional MRI scanners.

1.Simin Liu, Yuhui Xiong, Erpeng Dai, Jieying Zhang,Hua Guo*, Improving Distortion Correction for Isotropic High-Resolution 3D Diffusion MRI by Optimizing Jacobian Modulation,Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 2021.

2.Erpeng Dai, Simin Liu,Hua Guo*, High-Resolution Whole-Brain Diffusion MRI at 3T Using Simultaneous Multi-slab (SMSlab) Acquisition, Neuroimage.2021

3.Sisi Li, Yishi Wang, Zhangxuan Hu, Li Guan, Yong Hai, Hanwen Zhang, Le He, Wen Jiang4,Hua Guo*, High-Fidelity Diffusion Tensor Imaging of the Cervical Spinal Cord Using Point-Spread-Function Encoded EPI, Neuroimage, 2021, in press.

4.Diwei Shi, Ziyi Pan, Xuesong Li,Hua Guo*, Quanshui Zheng*,Diffusion coefficient orientation distribution function for diffusion magnetic resonance imaging, Journal of Neuroscience Methods , doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2020.108986

5.Jingwen Huang, Jun Shen, Qihua Yang , Ziliang Cheng, Xiaodong Chen, Taihui Yu, Jinglian Zhong, Yun Su,Hua Guo*,Biling Liang*, Quantification of pancreatic iron overload and fat infiltration and correlations with glucose disturbance in pediatric thalassemia major patients. Quantitative Imaging in Medicine and Surgery 2020. doi: 10.21037/qims-20-292.