Cynthia H. McCollough, Ph.D.

Dr. McCollough's research interests revolve around the technology of CT imaging and its many clinical applications.

Focus areas

As Director of the multi-disciplinary CT Clinical Innovation Center, Dr. McCollough works with numerous co-investigators on projects seeking to detect and quantify disease using CT imaging. These projects include perfusion imaging of the heart, brain and abdominal organs and material composition analysis using dual-energy and spectral CT.

CT scans are used now more than ever in medicine; they are fast, readily available, and can diagnose and guide treatment for a wide range of conditions. Dr. McCollough?s work focuses on maximizing the benefit and minimizing the risk from CT. She and her team are developing ways to keep radiation exposures as low as possible, while maintaining the needed image quality. They are also working to improve the benefits from CT imaging by developing new techniques to diagnose diseases that CT, or other methods, previously could not diagnose, as well as to develop quantitative measures of the extent of disease in order to evaluate disease progression or regression.

Professional highlights

Dr. McCollough is active in numerous national and international organizations in the areas of CT imaging and radiation dose assessment and reduction. She is additionally focused on the implementation of automated exposure control systems for CT which appropriately increase or decrease radiation dose based on individual body characteristics and exam requirements, thus optimizing image quality and dose on a patient by patient basis. Dr. McCollough remains active in the field of CT performance evaluation and protocol optimization.