Ming-Kai Chen, MD, PhD

Ming-Kai Chen, MD, PhD, is a radiologist in the Department of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging and co-medical director of PET Center. He has special expertise in nuclear medicine—a type of imaging that uses radioactive materials to detect and treat disease—as well as oncologic molecular imaging, which is used to take detailed imagines of the body at a cellular level to detect and monitor cancer.

“With the advance of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging,” Dr. Chen says, “we often can detect the disease at an early stage (and detect more metastatic disease) compared to convention diagnostic imaging.”

Dr. Chen, an associate professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale School of Medicine, is conducting research and a clinical trial about the use of PET imaging for synaptic density in the Alzheimer’s disease.

“We hope this new PET imaging could provide early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and serve as a reliable biomarker for the evaluation of treatment response,” he says.