Joint Venture for the Education of Imaging Scientists
From the Radiology Department Newsletter, Editor: Mary McAllister

The Radiology Imaging Program, an informal program in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is the result of a collaboration between ECE and Biomedical Engineering (BME) departments in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and the radiology department. 

The program included an introductory course called “Medical Imaging Systems” that provided students with a basic understanding of medical imaging, and an advanced MRI course that trained students in medical imaging research.   

“Graduate students had no courses between the introductory course and the advanced MR course,” says Dr. Benjamin Tsui. 

This meant that there was not only a gap in students’ education, but also that there was a lack of trained students to help carry out research and to train for careers in medical imaging.  When Dr. Tsui came to Hopkins in 2002, he wanted to address this gap and coordinate the medical imaging teaching effort across JHU, together with Drs. Elliott McVeigh and Mike Miller of BME and Drs. Paul Bottomley and Peter van Zijl in the Division of MR Research.  

This program has now been strengthened with an intermediate course called “Modern Medical Imaging and Instrumentation and Technique” spanning two semesters. Dr. Tsui recruited experts in various fields to teach additional courses about the different imaging modalities such as CT, basic x-ray principles, nuclear medicine/PET, ultrasound and dosimetry.   

Dr. Jerry Prince, Professor of ECE (with a joint appointment in Radiology), suggests that the radiology faculty volunteer to train students in medical imaging. 

“It is important for the faculty to get early exposure to a possible pool of graduate students and the training has to be done in a formal way,” he says. 

“We don’t take any Research Assistants who are not graduate students in this university,” Dr. Tsui notes. He emphasizes the importance of the training and mentoring that enables these graduate students to finish their Ph.D. degrees through their work as Research Assistants.

“It’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” Dr. Prince says.  And that seems evident by the growth and number of students now enrolled in the program.

Dr. Tsui says the Division of Medical Imaging Physics in the Department of Radiology alone currently has eight students from ECE, one from BME, and an additional six from the Department of Computer Science working as research assistants, and the division is still growing. 

“The number of students you graduate is where the real impact of this program lies,” said Dr. Prince.  

Dr. Tsui agrees.

“The whole idea is that, as we grow in research, we need graduate students, who usually stay five years,” he says.  “With this program, we get the benefit of knowing these students from the beginning.”

“The quality of the ECE students accepted into the program as Ph.D. candidates is outstanding—they are doing things in imaging research that we weren’t sure could be done, and would likely never have been done without them,” says Dr. Bottomley.

Dr. Tsui emphasized that “it’s good for the students, and it’s good for the stability and continuity of the research projects in our lab.”