BME graduate student Jennifer Xu, receives 2014 Best Paper Award in Medical Physics

The Medical Physics journal has selected the paper, “Cascaded systems analysis of photon counting detectors” by Jennifer Xu et al. to receive this year’s Sylvia & Moses Greenfield Award for the Best Paper Published in Medical Physics. Jen is a PhD student in the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering working under the supervision of Professor Jeffrey H. Siewerdsen at the I-STAR Lab.

Jen’s research involves breakthrough work in modeling the imaging performance of new x-ray photon counting detectors. Her image quality model gives analytical insight into the benefits of photon counting, low electronics noise, and the potential for high-quality x-ray spectral imaging.

“The model agreed with measurements of the image noise and spatial resolution of photon counting detectors,” says Jen, “and it quantifies the conditions for which photon counters have a benefit in comparison to conventional flat-panel x-ray detectors — and even the conditions where their performance is expected to be worse.” The research was conducted with support from an NIH R01 grant led by Dr. Siewerdsen on spectral / dual-energy x-ray imaging.

The winning paper was co-authored by a collaborative team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Philips Healthcare. In addition to Jennifer Xu and Jeffrey H. Siewerdsen, coauthors include: J. Webster Stayman, Assistant Professor; Wojciech Zbijewski, Research Associate; Grace Gang, postdoctoral fellow; Katsuyuki (Ken) Taguchi, Associate Professor in Radiology; John A. Carrino (Associate Prfessor in Radiology; and Mats Lundqvist and Erik Fredenberg at Philips Healthcare.

The award will be presented at the annual Awards & Honors ceremony at the 57th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) in July in Anaheim, California.