Val J. Lowe MD, FACS

Val J. Lowe, MD is a Professor of Radiology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA and is the director of the Mayo Clinic Molecular Imaging Resource and Director of the Imaging Program in the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center. He did his nuclear medicine training at Duke University and previous to being at Mayo Clinic was the Director of PET Imaging at St Louis University. Dr. Lowe has served on numerous NIH review committees and panels. He has 142 peer-reviewed publications and has funding through 22 NIH grants to study imaging.

Dr. Lowe and collaborators at Mayo Clinic are evaluating the utility of metabolic (FDG PET) and amyloid (PiB PET) multimodality brain imaging as part of a larger research project at Mayo Clinic on the development of neurodegenerative disease in the aging population. They have shown that amyloid imaging with PET can be an accurate measure of abnormal amyloid protein deposition in the brain and can differentiate certain kinds of neurodegenerative disease. While amyloid protein deposition in the brain is thought to be the pathologic hallmark of Alzheimers Disease (AD), very little is know about progressive amyloid accumulation in the human brain as people age and how it relates to AD and several other neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Lowes ongoing work will test PET imaging as a way to evaluate these aspects of amyloid deposition in the brain. Dr. Lowe's also has research interests focused on PET imaging in Oncology. He is studying the clinical use of PET in various tumors such as lung, head and neck, lymphoma, and thyroid cancer. His work was instrumental in leading to USA FDA approval of FDG for PET imaging. He and his team also recently obtained FDA approval of [C11] Choline for prostate cancer recurrence imaging at the Mayo Clinic. Animal imaging with SPECT/CT and PET/CT are a component of Dr. Lowes interests.