Terry Oakes has led a career as a Neuroimaging scientist, focusing on quantitative aspects of brain imaging with MRI and PET. Most recently, he was the Service Chief of Neuroimaging at NICoE, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where he led a team of 30 scientists and clinicians investigating Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in military service members. Prior to this, he was Director of Image Analysis at the Waisman Center at UW-Madison, also serving as interim Director of PET Research. Dr. Oakes has extensive experience in MRI and PET image acquisition and analysis, and also brings experience in managing large projects with large budgets in an environment characterized by regulatory constraints.
Ed Barker brings a wealth of experience in developing successful business operations in the medical imaging field, especially where partnerships between entities of widely varying size are necessary. Throughout Ed’s career, he has taken advantage of new technical capabilities to create new business opportunities.
Ed Barker started working for GE in Europe in 1977 to start up direct sales of CT scanners, and subsequently spent 8 years with Philips Medical Systems as marketing manager for CT and MRI. He then formed a partnership to sell CT and MRI imaging services to hospitals in New England, which culminated in taking the company public. He worked for several other medical device manufacturers, including Instrumentarium Imaging, Inc. as General Manager of US operations; BioChem Pharma as General Manager; R2 as International Sales Manager to market Mammo CAD and a Lung CAD system; Confirma, marketing a MRI Breast CAD system; and Median Technologies, Inc., as General Manager US operations to market a lung CAD system. Several of these positions culminated in selling the company or division. Ed is proud to say that both the buyer and the sellers received a fair and profitable return in each of the deals he negotiated. Since 2008 he has worked with several companies in a consultant capacity, mostly in the area of business development. Ed Barker has been the CEO of TherVoyant since 2013.
Wally Block is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Medical Physics, and Radiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he oversees a very active research program. His research career has focused on MRI applications related to cancer detection and therapy. Dr. Block worked for 5 years with GE Medical Systems developing a new MRI pulse programming language, EPIC, which is still in use today. This experience forms the basis for TherVoyant’s expertise in real-time control and feedback of MRI scanners. His subsequent research projects have provided insight into the disease categories and market positions which are best addressed by real-time MRI. Dr. Block’s role in TherVoyant is to bridge the gap between the technical aspects of the MRI scanner and the diseases which medical practitioners are trying to cure.
Karl Sillay is a neurosurgeon with extensive experience in interventional MRI surgical procedures. His background in Electrical Engineering provides him with a unique ability to bridge the needs of a neurosurgeon with the opportunities for technology to address them. Dr. Sillay helped to establish the first neurosurgical suite in Wisconsin prepared for operative MRI guided Deep Brain Stimulator implantations under general anesthesia utilizing a commercially available neurosurgical navigation platform. While developing this program, Dr. Sillay recognized the importance of procedure optimization, identifying numerous areas that could be improved. He focused on capturing the essence of the surgical workflow and improving the software design in order to improve patient outcomes by reducing operative time and increasing surgical efficiency. Dr. Sillay’s experience is well suited to guide the rapid clinical translation of these ideas into task-targeted FDA approved software interfaces and navigation control methods.
Andy Alexander is a Professor of Medical Physics and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He leads a large and broad MRI-focused research program, with projects that advance basic imaging capabilities as well as disease-focused projects. He is a nationally recognized leader in diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and has been working on projects involving real-time MRI for 20 years.
Dr. Alexander’s research has focused on applications of basic neuroimaging techniques for brain mapping, such as fMRI, DTI and white matter tractography, and quantitative MRI methods for characterizing brain tissue. He led one of the first groups to apply DTI and tractography for helping to guide neurosurgical tumor resections and to evaluate white matter following surgery. In 2009, Andy developed and applied MRI-guided procedures for planning, targeting, inserting, and monitoring the insertion of catheters into the putamen for evaluating convection enhanced delivery (CED) as a potential method for drug delivery into brain regions. With Dr. Sillay, Dr. Alexander conceptualized the methods for real-time MRI-guided targeting for accurate device insertion. Dr. Alexander brings rich expertise to TherVoyant, including experience with conventional neuroimaging methods for preoperative brain mapping (structural, MRA, functional, DTI, tractography), and MRI methods for targeting and monitoring of interventional procedures.
Ethan Brodsky is a Scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the departments of Radiology and Medical Physics, where he leads software development for real-time MRI projects in the brain, liver, and heart. In particular, Dr. Brodsky brings extensive experience in the development of real-time MRI techniques for interventional applications. He has a background as an MRI physicist, Electrical Engineer, and computer programmer, with expertise in MRI acquisition and reconstruction as well as in developing real-time and embedded control systems, 3D visualizations, and graphical user interfaces.
Dr. Brodsky has created and implemented the system for control and communication between MRI scanners and the TherVoyant user interface environment. The latest version includes a prototype targeting system which has proven very successful in phantom and animal experiments.
Peng Wang, Ph.D., is a passionate engineer and scientist with a career focus in medical imaging and instrumentation. He graduated with a major in electrical engineering from the Tsinghua University in China, and received his Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he studied new techniques for microwave cancer ablation. He developed a patented method for monitoring thermal ablation using radio frequency echoes. He has continued his research in the Department of Medical Physics in MRI Real-Time imaging for interventional procedures. Dr. Wang is a skilled software developer and is well-versed in computer vision and high-performance parallel computing. Since 2014, he has been involved in computer programming for Thervoyant’s Real-Time MRI user interface, and also is the lead for developing and validating our PredictRT product line. In 2013 he was elevated to a IEEE senior member.