Ge Wang is a world leading imaging scientist and biomedical engineer whose contributions have enduring major impacts on radiology, preclinical imaging, and micro-tomography, especially for x-ray computed tomography (CT) and bioluminescence tomography. His work crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries involving multiple modalities and multi-scales with key results in applied mathematics, medical physics, instrumentation, and applications. He received decades of continuous federal grant support including academic-industrial partnership and bioengineering partnership awards. His main collaborating sites include General Electric Global Research Center, Wake Forest, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale Medical Schools.

Ge Wang’s most significant publication is “A general cone-beam reconstruction algorithm” in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (Wang et al. 1993), which has been highly cited. This paper introduced the concept of spiral cone-beam CT scanning to solve the “long object” problem (longitudinal data truncation). Spiral cone-beam/multi-slice CT has become a standard imaging modality and cornerstone of modern radiology. The de facto standard algorithm for CT, filtered backprojection, has been extended to reconstruct volumetric images with spiral scanning. A majority of his >400 peer-reviewed journal papers and >30 patents focus on cone-beam spiral CT to address imaging performance and radiation dose issues. These contributed to widespread clinical acceptance of spiral cone-beam/multi-slice CT. Currently, there are >85 million CT scans yearly in USA alone, with a majority in the spiral cone-beam/multi-slice mode.

Bioluminescence tomography was developed since 2004 to allow in vivo 3D localization of bioluminescent probes for preclinical molecular imaging, largely based on pioneering work by Ge Wang. The algorithms and methods were first introduced and later refined by Ge Wang, collaborators and other peers. This was based in part on micro-CT reconstruction.

Ge Wang’s group introduced interior tomography in 2007 as a solution to the long-standing “interior problem” (transverse data truncation), targeting exact reconstruction of an internal region from truncated data, with major benefits such as low-dose/ultra-fast CT. His team enhanced interior tomography via compressed sensing in a highly cited 2009 paper, challenging the conventional wisdom that there is no unique solution to the interior problem. He pioneered general interior tomography and omni-tomography for the grand fusion of all relevant modalities (“all-in-one”) to acquire datasets simultaneously (“all-at-once”); for example for simultaneous CT-MRI.

Also, Ge Wang performed micro-tomography research to enable cone-beam image reconstruction of either elongated or planar samples. At Virginia Tech, he built a world-class multi-scale CT facility covering sample size and image resolution over six orders of magnitude and applied to a variety of topics demanding nano-/micro-imaging capabilities. In service to his former institution, Virginia Tech, Ge Wang led the multi-scale CT facility openly available to colleagues and industry.

Ge Wang’s leadership to the profession includes peer review and editorial duties for NIH, NSF, DOE, and many journals. He served as lead guest editor for four IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging special issues. He delivered numerous plenary/keynote/invited presentations at imaging conferences and major universities. He was Co-Chair of the 2008 International Conference on Biomedical Inverse Problems, General Chair of the 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, Technology/CT Category Chair of the 2014 World Molecular Imaging Congress, and will be Conference Chair for the 2017 Fully Three-Dimensional Image Reconstruction Conference, and Chair for the 2018 SPIE Conference on Developments in X-ray Tomography. He received multiple academic awards and peer recognitions, such as the 1997 Giovanni DiChiro Award for Outstanding Scientific Research from Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography, and the 2004 Herbert M. Stauffer Award for Outstanding Basic Science Paper in Academic Radiology, Association of University Radiologists, USA. He has been elected as Fellow of AIMBE (2002), Fellow of IEEE (2003), Fellow of SPIE (2007), Fellow of OSA (2009), Fellow of AAPM (2012), and Fellow of AAAS (2014).