Speaker
Dr
Vesna Sossi
(Vancouver)
Description
Abstract. First FGD PET images date to the mid ’70. While revolutionary, as their allowed for the very first time a glimpse into body and brain function in a living subject in a non invasive fashion, they offered very limited resolution. This talk will describe the major milestones in PET imaging that led from those very first, fuzzy, 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose brain images to images obtained with a resolution better than (2 mm)3 where exquisite detail of brain sub-regions can be observed. Hardware and software development, such as rapidly increasing computing power, development of 3D reconstruction algorithms, detector block design, use of LSO and finally time of flight PET, all contributed to an increase is resolution and sensitivity and a decrease in noise. The most recent milestone is the development of hybrid imaging scanners, that are able to take advantage of complementary strengths of different modalities; in this area the latest development is hybrid PET/MRI enabled by the rapid development of SiPM technology. There is an enormous growth of research in this area and some examples will be presented