Honoring a visionary.Advancing the future.

A Transformative Legacy

Pioneer of tomographic imaging in nuclear medicine

David E. Kuhl (1929–2017) was a physician-scientist who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and whose career transformed nuclear medicine and helped establish modern functional and molecular imaging. After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from Temple University in 1951, he received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 and completed his radiology training there. He subsequently advanced through the faculty ranks at Penn, becoming professor of radiology and chief of the Division of Nuclear Medicine. In 1976, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he led nuclear medicine and held senior academic and administrative positions. In 1986, he joined the University of Michigan as chief of nuclear medicine and director of its PET Center, helping make Michigan an internationally prominent center for positron-emission tomography. He remained active there until his retirement in 2011.

Kuhl’s defining achievement was the development of practical emission tomographic imaging. Beginning in the late 1950s, he devised methods for reconstructing cross-sectional images from measurements of radioactive tracers inside the body. Working with engineers and other scientists, he developed a succession of increasingly sophisticated SPECT instruments, including the Mark II, Mark III, and Mark IV, and demonstrated transaxial imaging in living patients before the introduction of X-ray computed tomography. His work showed that radionuclide imaging could do more than depict anatomy: it could measure regional physiology, including cerebral blood volume, blood flow, metabolism, and neurochemical activity in three dimensions. These innovations earned him recognition as the “Father of Emission Tomography.”

Kuhl also played a pivotal role in establishing fluorodeoxyglucose, or ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), as a tracer for studying human metabolism. In collaboration with scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health and Brookhaven National Laboratory, his group, which included Dr. Abass Alavi, Chairman of the DEK Foundation, used FDG to produce the first tomographic image of glucose metabolism in the human brain in 1976. FDG subsequently became the most widely used tracer in PET, enabling clinicians to identify abnormal metabolic activity in the brain, heart, and tumors. Kuhl and his colleagues applied these techniques to conditions such as epilepsy, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer. His innovations helped move PET and SPECT from experimental technologies into indispensable clinical tools used throughout neurology, cardiology, and oncology.

Through his combination of medicine, physics, engineering, radiochemistry, and neuroscience, Kuhl changed how physicians observe disease in living patients. His work laid much of the conceptual and technical foundation for contemporary molecular imaging, including today’s integrated PET/CT and PET/MRI systems. He was also a founding member of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, now known as the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. His legacy continues through the clinical practices he helped establish, the researchers he trained, and the David E. Kuhl Collegiate Professorship at the University of Michigan.