Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS
University of Palermo
The University of Palermo was founded in 1805 on the former Royal Academy of Studies. It is one of the major Italian universities by number of subscribers. The Faculty of Medicine is based at Paolo Giaccone University Hospital with more than two thousand of people operating within the structure of which about one half are part of the University staff. The University Hospital has about 250 outpatient clinics with more that 30.000 hospitalizzations and more than 380.000 outpatient visits each year with many departments of excellence in both the diagnostic and surgical context. It hosts a strong school of surgical oncology that can always benefit from the support of the Section of Radiological Sciences of the Department of Biopathology and Medical and Forensic Biotechnologies (DBMFB) for both cross-sectional imaging techniques and interventional radiology procedures (mainly chemoembolization, radiofrequency ablation and magnetic resonance guided high-energy focused ultrasound ablations). There is also a strong experience in both conventional and advanced/functional imaging technics to evaluate the response to treatment. In the last years thanks to national and international collaborations a new lab for pre-clinical studies has been inaugurated at the Section of Radiological Sciences; this lab, among other things, boasts the installation of an very high magnetic field strength (7T) MRI scanner for small animals. The Section of Radiological Sciences also hosts of the first and only Italian installation of trans-cranical MRgFUS system for the ttreatment of neurologic disorders; to our knowledge this is the first system never installed on a 1.5T MRI unit.
Key staff:
Massimo Midiri, MD, Full Professor of Radiology, Head Director of the Section of Radiological Sciences (Department of Biopathology and Medical and Forensic Biotechnologies) of the University Hospital “Paolo Giaccone” of Palermo.
Cesare Gagliardo, MD – is a Board Certified Radiologist, Research fellow in "Optimization of Magnetic Resonance techniques for guiding and monitoring therapy with Focused Ultrasounds", PhD student in "Neuroscience and Behavior Disorders".
