SIEMENS

I am a Chinese woman working in the United States for a German technology company,” says Li Pan, 37, as she introduces herself at the Siemens Center for Applied Medical Imaging (CAMI) located on the Johns Hopkins University medical campus in Baltimore, Maryland. CAMI has a long list of partners for various collaborative projects, including universities and research institutions in the U.S. and Europe, hospitals worldwide, and medical technology companies. “The center is international, the collaborations are international, and I’m international too!” she says.

Li Pan is part of a research group of about a dozen scientists and engineers. Their common goal is to explore various imaging modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer tomography (CT), to support surgical interventions. For example, MRI technology will soon allow doctors to follow and monitor a catheter in real time as it moves through the body of a patient. The team includes seven scientists working at CAMI in Baltimore, Siemens Corporate Technology in Princeton, and elsewhere. The group is developing new MRI techniques to assist minimally invasive interventional procedures such as biopsy of tissues and ablation, which applies radiofrequency waves to kill cancer tissues.

Scientists from all over the world come to CAMI to design research projects for Siemens scanners and negotiate collaborations. Siemens delivers the software for these projects, and researchers provide feedback in order to help the CAMI group improve their prototypes. “To date, our interventional software package has been delivered to eight countries,” Pan says proudly.

“At Siemens Corporate Research, we encounter people from all over the world,” says Pan. “Everybody brings his or her own perspective and ways to deal with issues. For example, Germans tend to raise issues very directly. If you are not familiar with this custom, you may mistake it for personal criticism — but with time, you learn not to.”

In 1991 Pan enrolled for a degree course in biomedical engineering at one of the best universities in China, Tsinghua University in Beijing. Fascinated by math and science since childhood, Pan loves to do hands-on work, and Tsinghua University’s teaching method also emphasizes that approach. Half of her classmates at the university continued their studies abroad after graduation, and so did Pan. In fact, she was the first Ph.D. candidate accepted directly from mainland China into the biomedical engineering program at Johns Hopkins University, which is widely regarded as one of the best teaching hospitals in the U.S. However, when she moved from Beijing to faraway Baltimore in 1999, things did not work out easily all the time.

A Leap into Cold Water. With less than perfect English, she had to manage plenty of new tasks right after she arrived — such as finding an apartment. “At universities in China, many of these things are taken care of for you. Here, I was on my own,” she says. Today she is the only one of her class from Tsinghua University who is still working in the field of biomedical engineering. Others decided to do research in different areas or became financial analysts or computer scientists. Many went back to China, in some cases because of the economic boom in their home country. But Pan stayed.

When she began to study at Johns Hopkins, she encountered a different teaching style. Students were able to work with different professors of their choice and develop their own research agendas. They had to think more independently, and after they had decided on a research project for a dissertation they themselves had to make sure they had the resources to carry it out.

At Johns Hopkins, Pan soon became fascinated by MRI technologies. In her doctoral thesis she developed algorithms that helped to identify heart dysfunction in real time using MRI. After completing her dissertation in 2006, she applied to Siemens. The Siemens research group that focused on interventional MRI had moved into a lab that was only two floors below Pan’s former workplace.

Pan and her colleagues, together with their partners in industry and research, are currently working on developing an MRI-guided interventional system to improve catheter-based cardiac procedures. Her own focus within this project is to develop software that allows physicians to navigate a catheter through the body to the heart by tracking its motion in real time. “My hope is that these technologies will become clinical standards in the near future,” she says. “But for us, there will certainly be plenty of new projects to work on. Research never ends.”