Speaker
Description
Over the past few years Mo-99m supply instability coupled with directives to eliminate the production dependence on HEU, have stimulated a number of new accelerator and reactor based concepts for the production of the important tracer Tc-99m following the conventional M0-99m carrier route. However, if one were to start from scratch today Tc-99m would not likely be used. There is a better cardiac imaging agent with much higher resolution images, significantly lower doses to patients and lower dwell times in patients, and essentially no radioactive waste- N13 Ammonia. This ‘gold standard’ for cardiac perfusion imaging has one limiting challenge- it’s short ~10 minute half-life, which nearly requires the isotope generator, in this case a low energy proton cyclotron and a water target, to be co-located or at least within a half-life or two of the PET camera. In this talk we will report on the development of a portable high field superconducting cyclotron for the production of unit dose N13 Ammonia in near proximity to the PET cameras, now being commercialized by Ionetix. Switching from O18 depleted water to O18 enriched water turns this N13 ammonia generator into a unit dose FDG generator, which will also be discussed.
