The Breast and Bone Density Group (BBDG) focuses on the development of new sensing and X-ray imaging methods and devices for quantifying tissue densities and body composition.

Who is part of the BBDG? We are mostly physicists and engineers who translate our core knowledge bases to medical applications.

What makes the BBDG awesome? Because of our affiliation to UCSF and international collaborators, we have access to huge datasets for testing our techniques for validity and clinical significance before investing in years of hardware development. The result is a streamlining of ideas to clinical practice. Some examples of the studies we work with are the Breast Cohort Study (with over 2,000,000 full-field digital mammograms and associated outcomes), the NHANES study (with 25,000 dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry scans), and the Health Aging and Body Composition Study.

Does this seem interesting to you? We are actively seeking future students for research rotations and full time thesis students for imaging, instrumentation, and algorithm development.

BBDG 2011 (Left to Right): Jenny Sherman, Serghei Malkov, Jeff Wang, Bo Fan, Joey Wilson, Cassidy Powers, Fred Duewer, Mary Sherman, John Shepherd