Conveners
New technologies for PET/MR and TB-PET: Part 1
- Antonio J. Gonzalez
New technologies for PET/MR and TB-PET: Part 2
- Giancarlo Sportelli
New technologies for PET/MR and TB-PET: Part 3
- Paul Lecoq
New technologies for PET/MR and TB-PET: Part 4
- Paweł Moskal
Nowadays, the technology associated to Time-of-Flight (TOF) Positron Emission Tomography (PET) detectors is reaching the technological limit imposed by the scintillator crystal and photosensors available. Improving the TOF resolution is key to further increase the effective sensitivity of the system. As an alternative, this effective boost in sensitivity can be accomplished by increasing the...
Total body positron emission tomography (TB-PET) is currently changing the way the medical imaging community approaches PET scanner and data acquisition system designs, shifting the focus to reducing costs while still achieving good 3-D spatial resolution, time resolution and sensitivity.
Monolithic BGO-based detectors allow to significantly cut costs compared to the 3x more expensive...
We perform a simulation study to investigate the potential of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for gamma arrival time prediction in monolithic PET detectors with waveform digitizers. GATE v8.2 is used to simulate gamma interactions and production of scintillation light in a 50x50x16 mm³ monolithic LYSO crystal, coupled to an 8x8 readout array of silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). The SiPM...
In PET systems, processing sensor data, such as gamma event positioning, directly on detector level is beneficial for early data reduction and scalability to large systems. Especially in total-body PET with its large amount of detectors, low-cost electronics for early data processing are required. Gradient tree boosting (GTB) has been proven as an accurate method for positioning in planar and...
Modern PET scanners are often based on scintillating crystals read out by photo sensors. The large number of channels is processed by specialized electronic microchips. Data produced by these chips must be received by suitable data acquisition circuits and brought outside of the scanner to a data processing unit where hits must be sorted in time in order to find pairs of hits within a...
Recent developments in Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) sensors and fast readout electronics are enabling new achievements in Coincidence-Time Resolution (CTR) for Positron-Emission Tomography (PET) detectors. The new 8-channel FastIC ASIC developed in CMOS 65~nm technology provides an accurate time-stamping of the detected particles and a linear energy measurement while having a power...
Blumino is a fully integrated analog silicon photomultiplier with on-chip discriminator and time-to-digital converter. The benefit of this approach is the scalability and compactness. In addition, the small form factor, high gain and low parasitic capacitance improve the overall timing performance. The sensor comprises an analog SiPM developed by On Semiconductor which exhibits a PDE greater...
The combination of PET and MRI to a simultaneous system poses challenges concerning the integration and optimization of both subsystems' performance. One crucial part of the integration process is a good RF shielding of the PET modules to reduce mutual interferences. The PET modules are typically completely enclosed and restrict the system configuration. We propose an approach with RF...
The ideal distribution of the detectors of a preclinical Positron Emission Tomography scanner is a sphere with the subject located at its center. However, rigid scintillators crystals and detectors do not suit smooth figures. A truncated icosahedron has been previously proposed as a feasible approach to cover 4$\pi$ steradian. In order to tile the polyhedron, hexagonal scintillators and...
In PET a high percentage of gamma photons being detected undergo Compton scatter in the scintillator. Depending on the angle of incidence and the scintillator geometry this might lead to inter crystal scatter (ICS) events, where energy is deposited in two or more different crystals in the detector, which common positioning and reconstruction algorithms cannot resolve. Therefore, scattered...
Total-body PET imaging is one of the most exploited topics in medical imaging. State-of-the-art PET scanners use inorganic scintillators such as L(Y)SO or BGO. We report the performance comparative studies of the total-body PET scanners using Jagiellonian PET (J-PET) technology that is based on the plastic scintillators. Four realistic total-body scanner geometries, varied in the number of...
There is an ongoing interest in the development of Total-Body PET scanners. J-PET Collaboration from Jagiellonian University, as one of the groups focused on development of such tomograph, investigate the possibility of PET scanner construction based on the novel geometrical configuration and unique utilization of organic scintillators. Despite many advantages of Total-Body PETs, they create...
Commercially available PET/MRI scanner have been designed as whole-body systems. In these, PET spatial resolution and sensitivity are limited. Dedicated PET inserts can potentially overcome these limitations, but every application, e.g., neuro, breast, or preclinical, has different requirements.
A PET detector platform for simultaneous PET/MRI was thus designed, providing the needed...
The quest for pushing the limits of PET’s effective sensitivity has led to two important R&D lines, illustrated by the remarkable development of the Total Body PET Explorer project and the 10 ps Time-of-Flight PET challenge.
But there is no reason why these two approaches cannot be combined, along a route already open by the Siemens Biograph Vision Quadra machine, with a length of 106cm and...
The i3M is currently involved in the development of a clinical Total Body PET (TB-PET) scanner of approximately 80 cm diameter and 70 cm axial coverage. At this moment, different detectors based on semi-monolithic blocks with different surface treatments and read out by different SiPM arrays are being characterized, in order to assess how the different parameters affect the detector...
In the field of time-of-flight positron emission tomography (PET-TOF), the time resolution of the scintillation-based detector is an essential feature. Recent studies have shown that some materials have fast emissions in the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) region.
To acquire the fast-rising signals of these emissions, we are using optimized Coincidence Time Resolution (CTR) test boards with two...
Scintillators play an important role in the detection of ionizing radiation. Improving extraction and detection of the generated light is a must to provide sufficient information on the high-energy particles interacting with the crystal. The amount of light extracted and its temporal distribution have a direct impact on the overall system performance. In positron emission tomography, energy...
