Leadership at the Gordon Center

Georges El Fakhri, Director of the Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, is an internationally recognized expert in quantitative SPECT, PET-CT, and PETMR.

Dr. El Fakhri is a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and the founding Director of the Gordon Center for Medical Imaging. He also directs the Massachusetts General Hospital PET Core, and is Co-Director of the Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.

Dr. El Fakhri is an internationally recognized expert in quantitative SPECT, PET-CT, and PETMR. He has pioneered novel approaches to compensate for many of the physical factors affecting quantitative SPECT, PET/CT and PET/MR and objectively assessing the achieved improvement in image quality, specifically in PET oncologic, neurologic and cardiac imaging as well as in the development of novel approaches to quantitative cardiac and brain modeling.

In SPECT/MR his pioneering work has identified the relative role of different brain structures (e.g. entorhinal cortex, anterior cingulate) in the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease in large cohorts of patients followed over a decade with perfusion SPECT and structural MRI.

Dr El Fakhri’s Lab pioneered some of the early dopamine displacement studies with PET and more recently mapping neurotransmission (e.g., dopamine, serotonin) in normal subjects and severe depression. He has also pioneered the use of in-room PET for monitoring proton therapy and assessing changes in O-15 washout through kinetic modeling.

In the heart, Dr. El Fakhri developed the early kinetic modeling, parametric imaging and quantitative framework for Rb-82 imaging and validated measured absolute myocardial blood.

Recent work includes the development of novel approaches to mapping mitochondrial complex I and membrane potential non invasively in the heart as well as developing synergistic approaches in PET/MR for motion compensation, anatomical priors, PET/fMRI and PET/MRS. Dr El Fakhri is an IEEE and SNMMI Fellow.