Newswise — Scientist and inventor Stephen Wong, Ph.D, PE, led teams that developed the first inkjet printer production, the online stock trading system at Charles Schwab, the first 1MB DRAM production, which is now a commodity in computer memory, and the integrated digital image archive system used by hospitals and physicians across the world to quickly access patients' medical records electronically.
Wong recently was named chief of medical physics and vice chair of the department of radiology at The Methodist Hospital, and the director of the bioinformatics program at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute.
An internationally acclaimed biomedical engineer and computer scientist, Wong will develop a systems-oriented bioinformatics program at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute to analyze, translate and mine the 'tsunami' of information generated by today's imaging and biological technologies into useful diagnostic tests and treatments for disease.
Wong came to Methodist—with his team of 18 colleagues -- from the Harvard Center of Neurodegeneration and Repair (HCNR) at Harvard Medical School, where he founded the Center for Bioinformatics and from the Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he founded the Functional and Molecular Imaging Center. He was also an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and member of neuro-oncology program at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. His research has been funded by the NIH for decades, and he will bring $4 million in NIH grants to the Research Institute.
Like at Harvard the focus of his bioinformatics research is to identify early diagnostic markers for prediction and prevention of diseases and for individualized treatments.
"The advancement of medical imaging technology is coming faster than people expect," Wong said. "Within a decade, we'll be able to use molecular imaging and diagnostics to predict whether a patient will have a heart attack in the next six months. Armed with that level of detail and information about a patient's medical condition, we can try to prevent the attack in the first place."
Medical physics is an emerging area of physics. It uses concepts from physics to help diagnose and treat human disease. It is becoming an important discipline in large medical centers to optimize operations of medical imaging scanners, diagnostics devices and intervention equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As chief of medical physics, working with King Li, MD, MBA, chair of radiology, Wong also will develop molecular image guided therapy technologies that enable less invasive surgical procedures and better drug delivery.
"With the advancement of medical and molecular imaging, we can make the patient 'transparent.' Imaging allows us to see things that human eyes cannot see. We are getting to a point in which we will program a patient's anatomy into a computer and know within fractions of a millimeter where to make incisions to spare good tissue while removing or treating everything that's diseased," he said. Wong has more than 20 years of global research and development experience with Hewlett-Packard, Bell Labs, Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems project, Royal Philips Electronics, Charles Schwab, University of California " San Francisco, and Harvard.
Wong received his executive education from MIT Sloan School of Management, Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Columbia University Graduate School of Business.
Wong holds six patents in biomedical technology and has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers and three books. He also serves on NIH and NSF panels, journal editorial boards, non-profit organization advisory boards and conference program committees.
For more information about The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, see www.methodisthealth.com/research.
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