Bijoy Kumar Kundu
About
Bijoy K. Kundu, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the tenure track in the department of Radiology and Medical Imaging at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. After completing his PhD in Nuclear Physics from the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, India, he pursued his post-doctoral work at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. He then moved to the Department of Radiology, University of Virginia, as a post-doctoral associate and moved up the faculty ranks. Dr. Kundu is a member of many scientific societies and reviewer of a number of peer-reviewed journals. The goals of his lab are to develop and optimize quantitative cardiac PET imaging techniques to address the hypothesis of metabolic remodeling in small animal modelsof myocardial injury and type 2 diabetes. His lab is currently funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Profile on the School of Medicine Website
Research Statement
The general goal of my laboratory is the development and application of novel Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging and quantification methods for non-invasive evaluation of metabolism and blood flow from time-resolved PET images of rodent heart in vivo. Imaging the rodent heart is challenging due to the small size of the heart and the limited spatial intrinsic resolution of the microPET scanner. This results in severe partial volume averaging (PV) and spill-over (SP) of radioactivity from the LV blood pool to the myocardium at the early time points and vice-versa at the late time points in a dynamic PET scan of the rodent heart. Rapid heart motion results in further image blur confounding the effects of SP contamination in the image-derived blood input function.
My laboratory focuses on the development of multi-parameter compartment models for simultaneous estimation of the blood input function with SP and PV corrections and the kinetic parameters from dynamic PET images of the heart, for quantifying myocardial glucose (using 18F-FDG) and fatty-acid (using 11C-Palmitate) metabolism and blood flow (using 13N-ammonia) in vivo. In collaboration with a number of investigators in the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia and University of Texas in Houston, we have assembled a strong team to evaluate the time course of metabolic alterations in the hearts of spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) and relate these changes to the development of LVH and HF using advanced PET and MR imaging in vivo and ex vivo molecular and metabolic analysis in conjunction with hemodynamic measurements. The work in my laboratory is funded by the National Institute of Health’s National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.
In addition, my laboratory is also collaborating with faculties in the Departments of Radiology and Neurology at UVA in the development of novel strategies for improved demonstration of functional brain abnormalities from dynamic FDG PET images of human brain using kinetic modeling.
We are also collaborating with faculties in the Department of Radiology at UVA and a group in Spain (Oncovision Inc and ERESA hospital in Valencia), in the development of novel algorithms for automatic segmentation of cancerous breast lesions from the background based on artificial neural networks (ANN) from dynamic FDG breast PET images.
Current Projects
- Development of improved methods for quantification of metabolism and blood flow from dynamic PET images of rodent and human heart in vivo
- Determine the time course of metabolic alterations in the SHR hearts and relate them to the development of LVH and HF using dynamic PET imaging and kinetic modeling in conjunction with MRI and molecular and metabolic analyses
- Development of novel methods for improved demonstration of function brain abnormalities from dynamic FDG PET images of human brain using kinetic modeling
- Development of algorithms for automatic segmentation of breast lesions based on ANN from dynamic images obtained using a dedicated breast PET scanner
In the News
UVA Develops Imaging Approach to Help Stop Epilepsy Seizures
Education
B.S. Physics, Bombay University, 1990
M.S. Physics, Bombay University, 1992
Ph.D. Physics, Bhabha Atomic Research Center, 1998
We are developing quantitative cardiac PET imaging techniques to address metabolic remodeling in small animal models of myocardial injury & type 2 diabetes.