Rate My Professor Kate Calnan

Kate Calnan serves as an instructor for Nuclear Medicine Studies 1 (RADI 2000) at Adelaide University, where she contributes to practical sessions for students in the Bachelor of Medical Radiation Science (Honours) program. These sessions occur on Tuesdays from 11:10am to 1pm at the Adelaide City Campus East, alongside other instructors including Doug Smyth, Rachel Watherston, Kate Cook, Olivia Richardson, and Katherine Guerrero. The course is part of the School of Allied Health and Human Performance offerings.

Professionally known as Deborah Kate Calnan, she holds a Bachelor of Medical Radiation (BMedRad) and is affiliated with the Department of Nuclear Medicine at Royal Adelaide Hospital and South Australian Medical Imaging, with connections to the University of Adelaide. As a senior technologist, she has expertise in nuclear medicine, molecular imaging, nuclear imaging, radiopharmaceuticals, medical imaging physics, clinical imaging, medical image analysis, radiolabeling, image reconstruction, and PET/CT. Her research involves clinical applications in nuclear medicine, including a 20-year statewide audit of 13C/14C Urea Breath Testing for Helicobacter pylori infection, which analyzed testing indications, demographics showing increased female testing, 14% positivity rates, and 73% eradication rates potentially impacted by antibiotic resistance. Another study examined 13C Xylose Breath Testing for Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth over 8 years with 179 tests, yielding 75.9% positivity, median patient age of 54, 72.6% female patients, primarily for bloating symptoms, and risk factors like diabetes. She co-authored on standardising communication of radiation risks with PET scans, effects of standard versus energy-dense formulae on gastric emptying in enterally fed ICU patients (2021, Journal of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition), combined chemotherapy and endoscopic ultrasound-guided fiducial placement for neoadjuvant therapy in resectable pancreatic cancer (2022), reproducibility of semi-quantitative lobar pulmonary uptake on ventilation/perfusion SPECT (2017), and PSMA-PET/CT lesion segmentation models trained on 68Ga-PSMA-11 scans using nnUNet-based approaches with Dice scores up to 0.538 and strategies like patch sizes of 192×192×192 and pre-training on CT/MRI data. She appears in acknowledgments for nuclear medicine support in Lancet clinical trial appendices.