Open AccessPushing the Limits in Time-of-Flight PET Imaging
Author(s) -
P. Lecoq
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
ieee transactions on radiation and plasma medical sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2469-7303
pISSN - 2469-7311
DOI - 10.1109/trpms.2017.2756674
Subject(s) - nuclear engineering , engineered materials, dielectrics and plasmas , bioengineering , computing and processing , fields, waves and electromagnetics
There is an increasing demand for high sensitivity multiparametric medical imaging approaches. High precision time-of-flight positron emission tomography (TOFPET) scanners have a very high potential in this context, providing an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio of the reconstructed image and the possibility to further increase the already very high sensitivity (at the pico-molar level) of PET scanners. If the present state-of-the art coincidence time resolution of about 500 ps can be improved, it will open the way in particular to a significant reduction of the dose injected to the patient, and consequently, to the possibility to extend the use of PET scans to new categories of patients. This paper will describe the systematic approach followed by a number of researchers worldwide to push the limits of TOFPET imaging to the sub-100 ps level. It will be shown that the possibility to reach 10 ps, although extremely challenging, is not limited by physical barriers and that a number of disruptive technologies are presently being investigated at the level of all the components of the detection chain to gain at least a factor of 10 as compared to the present state-of-the-art.