School of Medicine
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Quan Zhou
Instructor, Neurosurgery
Affiliate, NeurosurgeryCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent 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. -
J. Bradley Zuchero
Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWe are primarily focused on understanding myelinating glia (oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells). How is myelin formed, dynamically remodeled to support learning, and why does regeneration of myelin fail in disease? We are also interested in understanding novel roles of myelin in the nervous system, beyond its textbook role as an electrical insulator. We combine in vivo and primary culture models with the generation of new cell biology tools to answer these questions.
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Corinna Zygourakis, MD
Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy goal is to translate research into real-world action and decision-making so that my work can impact patients and the institutions in which they receive care. With a research focus on healthcare cost and quality of care, I approach neurosurgery in a unique way—one that applies business operations, economics, and healthcare delivery principles to our field. I have pursued formal LEAN business training, and believe in the importance of working together with other departments and administrators, as well as physicians and surgeons on the hospital and national level, to effect change. During my residency, I developed and led a multi-departmental prospective study at UCSF called OR SCORE (OR Surgical Cost Reduction Project) that brought together surgeons from the neurosurgery, orthopedics and ENT departments with nurses and administrators. OR SCORE successfully reduced surgical supply costs by nearly one million dollars in its first year by providing >60 surgeons with price transparency scorecards. This work led to a first-author publication in JAMA Surgery, but more importantly, set the foundation for further quality improvement and cost reduction efforts across the UCSF hospital system.
A volunteer neurosurgical mission trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, where limited resources create an OR environment that is strikingly more frugal than the U.S., inspired me to lead another project aimed at quantifying and reducing operating room waste at UCSF. I have also conducted research looking at the safety and outcomes of overlapping surgery, as well as several projects to define the factors underlying variation in cost for neurosurgical care using UCSF’s hospital data and national databases like the National Inpatient Sample, Vizient (formerly known as University Health Consortium), and Medicare.
As a clinical fellow at Johns Hopkins, I continued and expanded these research efforts. I designed and implemented an Enhanced Recovery after Surgery (ERAS) protocol at the Johns Hopkins Bayview hospital. This protocol standardized care for our spine patients, emphasizing pre-operative rehabilitation, psychiatric and nutritional assessments, and smoking cessation, as well as intra- and post-operative multi-modal pain therapy, early mobilization, and standardized antibiotic and bowel regimens. I also collaborated with engineers in the Johns Hopkins Carnegie Center for Surgical Innovation to develop better algorithms for intra-operative CT imaging, and provided assistance with operations to a basic science study looking at the role of cerebrospinal fluid drainage and duraplasty in a porcine model of spinal cord injury.
At Stanford, I am building a research group focused on: (1) perfecting paradigms for delivery of high-end technology in spinal care, including robotics and navigation, (2) implementing cost and quality strategies in large healthcare systems, and (3) computational analysis of big-data to effect real-time risk stratification and decision making in spine surgery. I'm excited to collaborate with my peers across surgical and medical departments, as well as business and engineering colleagues.