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pre-symposium workshop
TOF PET (Time-of-flight Positron Emission Tomography)
Friday 4 September 2009 Hotel Baia delle Zagara
Motivation PET is a powerful and sensitive technique for functional imaging. Significant progress has been made during the last two decades in detectors, electronics, data acquisition, and image processing that impact both image quality and accuracy of quantification, but methods to improve SNR are still needed. For this reason, the re-introduction of the Time-Of-Flight (TOF) PET can be considered one of the key technologies for the future. While TOF is already a commercial reality, improving TOF resolution will have a significant impact on image quality, especially if small organs are involved. The challenges to improving TOF resolution are those of finding cost-effective solutions for fast scintillators, fast photosensors, and fast and compact electronics. Timing resolution depends critically on various parameters, and careful optimization of tradeoffs is needed.
Fast timing is often required in high energy and nuclear physics apparatus, mainly for particle identification, so spin-off technologies from these communities may play a crucial role in this particular medical imaging development.
The scope of this short workshop will include reviewing the state of the art of presently available commercial TOF PET systems and discussing new developments in scintillators, photodetectors, and electronics technologies. Special emphasis will be placed on their interplay and their impact on the TOF performance of PET devices, including small imagers applicable to intraoperative imaging. |
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