Talissa Altes
Talissa (Tally) Altes, M.D.Associate Professor and Vice Chairman of Clinical Research,
Radiology and Medical Imaging (434) 924-0211 |
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| Research Interests |
In 1998 as a radiology resident at UVA, I became involved in lung imaging research using hyperpolarized gas as a non-toxic, non-radioactive inhaled contrast agent for MRI. By allying with John Mugler, PhD and Eduard de Lange, MD, we have built a very strong hyperpolarized gas MRI research program at UVA. I pioneered the application of this technique in a variety of lung diseases including asthma, cystic fibrosis (CF), and bronchopulmonary dysplasia (also known as chronic lung disease of prematurity). Dr Mugler pioneered a number of hyperpolarized gas imaging techniques including diffusion weighted imaging and direct dissolved phase imaging. Our lab has imaged more human subjects than any other site, and UVA is considered one of the preeminent sites for hyperpolarized gas MRI. We have an outstanding record of continuous funding (over $17M since 1999 including $13M from NIH, $1M from foundations/state, and $3M from industry). My background in engineering has enabled me to work closely with the MRI physicists in the lab and provided me a depth of understanding of their work. As a physician, my role in the lab is to oversee all of the human subject aspects of our projects including conceiving new projects, writing and maintaining our institutional review board (IRB) protocols, recruiting and evaluating subjects, overseeing the imaging, ensuring the safety of our research subjects, evaluating the image analysis, and overseeing our study coordinators. Further, I mentor the MRI physics graduate students and post doctoral fellows in the clinical aspects of their research. Other techniques for evaluating the activity or severity of lung disease have important limitations. CT delivers relatively high doses of ionizing radiation to the patient/subject, which carries a small but non-zero risk of inducing cancer. Spirometry cannot be performed by young children and is known to be insensitive to small changes in disease severity. Our technique is very safe and thus may be repeated frequently to gain a better understanding of the time course of response to treatment or simply the natural history of different lung diseases. For example, in asthmatics we found that the areas of abnormal lung ventilation are not randomly varying with time as many had presumed, but instead recur in the same locations within the lung over time and following provocation (eg exercise). This has important implications for the basic understanding of the disease and its treatment, and has led us to a new method for investigating the underlying pathophysiology of asthma-imaged guided bronchoscopy. We have ongoing projects with two pharmaceutical companies interested in using our technique during drug discovery. We recently pioneered the technique in non-sedated infants, a potentially important breakthrough in that for the first time there is a quantitative measure of the severity of lung disease in infants. |
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| Publication Highlights |
Gerber RE, Brant WE, Petroze RT, Rudakemwa E, Moshi C, Ntakiyiruta
G, Ngenzi J, Rheuban KS, Altes TA, Calland JF.
Picturing the climate: radiologic assessment of Rwandan imaging
capacity. J Am Coll Radiol. 2012 Jan;9(1):69-73. |
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