Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Current Research Focus: molecular targeted theranostic imaging of brain tumor and enhanced drug delivery
Areas of Insterests: molecular imaging, theranostics, fluorescence-guided surgery, brain tumor, drug delivery
Dr. Zhou has made substantial contributions to the growing biomedical research field of Molecular Imaging. Molecular imaging emerged in the mid twentieth century as a highly specialized discipline at the intersection of molecular biology and in vivo imaging, focusing on imaging molecules of medical interest within intact living subjects. Dr. Zhou’s research addresses some of the nation’s most pressing issues related to the development of effective approaches for accurate detection of human diseases and improving their treatment outcome. Her innovations in molecular imaging technology enables the visualization, characterization, and quantification of biologic processes taking place at the cellular and subcellular levels. The multiple and numerous potentialities of Quan’s work are applicable to the diagnosis of diseases such as cancer, neurological and cardiovascular diseases. Her strong education background in biological sciences and biomedical engineering followed by postdoctoral training in translational and clinical research have helped her develop multiple disease-specific molecular probes and imaging strategies for early cancer diagnosis, image-guided surgery, therapeutic delivery prediction and at-risk cardiovascular plaque detection. Her research also contributes to improving the treatment of these disorders by testing and optimizing the execution of new interventions. Her work is expected to have a major economic impact due to earlier disease detection and personalized therapy.
Dr. Zhou’s research has led to emergence of novel solutions and opportunities, in particular, for molecular imaging of cancer and other diseases, for discovering, leveraging and integration of cancer biomarker and tumor microenvironment information, and for novel approaches to acquire real-time high-resolution contrast enhanced visualization of tumor margin and optimization based on imaging depth, quality and speed. Dr. Zhou has been able to formulate the involved clinical and biological problems into biomedical engineering frameworks and find ways to exploit a variety of modern techniques and approaches from photoacoustic imaging, fluorescence-guided surgery, micro-electromechanical systems and therapeutic delivery strategies in developing elegant and effective solutions. Her work in the Neurosurgery Department and Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford involves research related to developing tumor-specific molecular probes, advanced imaging methods and therapeutic delivery systems for adult and pediatric patients with malignant brain cancers to improve margin detection, enhance resection accuracy, and improve treatment outcome.
