Biography
Yi Wang PhD graduated from Fudan University, Shanghai with a BA in Nuclear Physics in 1986, and received his MS in Theoretical Physics from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in 1988, and his PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1994 with his thesis work on magnetic resonance imaging advised by Dr. Charles A Mistretta. He completed a postdoctoral research fellowship with Dr. Richard L Ehman at the Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Mayo Clinic, where he continued his research in magnetic resonance imaging technology development and where in 1996 he was promoted to the rank of Assistant Professor. In 1997, he joined Cornell University Medical College as an Assistant Professor of Physics in Radiology. He initiated a course on medical imaging and became a faculty member of Physiology, Biophysics and System Biology. Between 2002 – 2004, he joined the faculty at the School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh as Tenured Associate Professor of Radiology and Director of Cardiovascular MRI Physics. In 2004, he returned to Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Currently he holds the Faculty Distinguished Professorship at the Department of Radiology, and is a tenured Professor of Physics in Radiology, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and a faculty member of Physiology, Biophysics, and System Biology graduate program. Dr. Wang is a Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Dr. Wang has served as a scientific reviewer of grant applications for many agencies including NIH (chartered member of MEDI study section, 2003-2007, and ad hoc member for a variety of study sections), Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, Swiss National Science Foundation, and The Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom.
Dr Wang’s Dr. Wang's research interest is in developing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology for clinical applications using methodologies and tools from mathematics, physics, electronic engineering, computer science, and biology. He has developed the real time navigator method to measure motion and compensate for motion artifacts in cardiac imaging, which has become widely adopted in research and clinical practice for thoracic and abdominal imaging. This navigator motion artifact suppression method holds great promise for developing high resolution multiple contrast MRI of coronary artery wall in assessing risk of plaque rupture (heart attack) in patients. Dr. Wang has also pioneered the time resolved imaging of contrast agent bolus for generating magnetic resonance angiography and the bolus chase acquisition method for generating peripheral magnetic resonance angiography, which have become routinely used in clinical imaging. Recently Dr. Wang’s group has introduced a fundamentally new approach to MRI, magnetic source MRI, for mapping magnetic susceptibility source by inverting the local magnetic field estimated from MRI phase signal. Magnetic source MRI technology solves the magnetic field to dipole source inverse problem in Physics using multiple orientation sampling or intensity based regularization without rotation. Magnetic source MRI enables direct and quantitative detection of contrast agents that is essential to molecular imaging, overcoming the traditional T1/T2/T2* relaxation based indirect and non-quantitative methods. Magnetic source MRI holds promise for a wide range of clinical applications, including assessing the risk of cerebral hemorrhage in patient under anticoagulant treatment, evaluating iron deposition in patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases, assaying bone mineralization and bone fracture risk in patients with osteoporosis, measuring iron overloading in the heart and liver in patients with Thalassemia and hemochromatosis.
