Charles Peterfy, MD, PhD

Charles Peterfy, MD, PhD, is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Spire Sciences LLC, which provides central image analysis and image-quality control services for pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical devices clinical trials.  Dr. Peterfy is a board-certified radiologist with fellowship training from University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and a PhD in Pharmacology and Therapeutics from McGill University.  He was attending radiologist at UCSF for seven years where he also served as Director of Arthritis Research for the Osteoporosis and Arthritis Research Group.  In 1998, Dr. Peterfy co-founded CCBR-Synarc Inc and served as its Chief Scientific Officer until leaving to form Spire Sciences in 2009.  He is also a founding member and Secretary of the International Society of Extremity MRI in Rheumatology.

Dr. Peterfy has been developing, validating and implementing innovative imaging techniques for clinical research for over 20 years.  He helped design and execute more than 50 multi-site clinical trials in rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, fracture healing and other musculoskeletal disorders.  He developed the WORMS (Whole-Organ MRI Score) system for assessing osteoarthritis of the knee, articular cartilage volume quantification using MRI, and the fixed-flexion X-ray technique and SynaFlexer positioning frame for radiography of the knee in osteoarthritis.  He invented the Syn-X-RA frame for radiography of the hand, wrist and foot, and the Syn-M-RA frame for MRI of the hand and wrist in clinical trials of rheumatoid arthritis.  Dr. Peterfy co-developed the RAMRIS (Rheumatoid Arthritis MRI Score) and PsAMRIS (Psoriatic Arthritis MRI Score) methods as part of the OMERACT (Outcome Measures in Rheumatology Clinical Trials) MRI Working Group.  He also chaired the Imaging Working Group of the NIH Osteoarthritis Initiative.  Dr. Peterfy has authored over 150 scientific articles and book chapters, and edited two textbooks.