Conveners
Specialized fast detectors
- Sun Il Kwon (University of California Davis)
- Pedro Almeida (Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa - Instituto de Biofísica e Engenharia Biomédica)
We are developing a Prompt Gamma (PG) detector (TIARA, for Tof Imaging ARrAy) dedicated to the real-time monitoring of Particle Therapy treatments through the exclusive measurement of particle Time-Of-Flight. The current prototype consists of 8 gamma detection modules placed downstream the patient and read in time coincidence with a beam hodoscope placed upstream: the time elapsed between an...
The great potential for precision dose delivery with proton therapy remains to be fully exploited, largely due to uncertainties in range that require conservative treatment margins. Analysis of time distributions from prompt gamma-ray emissions offers a means to precisely verify the range in real time and shrink treatment margins, thus increasing effectiveness and reducing toxicity.
We...
The intial tests carried out with MACACO III Compton camera for radiotherapeutical therapy (RPT) assessment developed by the IRIS group of IFIC-Valencia yielded encouraging results. Derenzo-like phantoms filled with 18F-FDG and 131I-NaI allowed visualization of 3 mm and 4 mm diameter rods, while in the first tests with patients treated with 131I-NaI it was possible to correlate the lesions...
One of the limiting factors of spatial resolution in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is the acollinearity of the annihilation photons (APA). For a whole-body PET scanner, APA induces a blurring of about 2 mm FWHM. We have previously shown that perfect TOF resolution can reduce the blurring induced by APA, i.e., overcome the conventional theoretical limit of spatial resolution....
TOF information is essential to the improvement of image quality in PET reconstruction. However, the fastest TOF resolution currently available commercially, at around 200 ps, is not good enough to realize reconstruction-free imaging, and therefore, PET systems still require a ring geometry to satisfy the completeness condition in image reconstruction. On the other hand, a 30 ps TOF resolution...
