Speaker
Description
The emergence of new technologies in the domain of nanophotonics, microelectronics, artificial intelligence, etc… open new perspectives for PET scanners with ultimate Time-of-Flight (TOF) performance. An ultimate goal of 10ps has been set in the frame of the 10ps TOFPET challenge: https://the10ps-challenge.org
Achieving this ambitious goal would allow improving the PET effective sensitivity by a factor of 20 as compared to the best performing TOFPET today, the Biograph Vision from Siemens, opening the way to a reduction of the radiation dose (currently 5-25 mSv for whole body PET/CT), scan time (currently > 10 minutes), and costs per patient (currently > 1000 € per scan), all by an order of magnitude.
A first generation of metascintillators has been developed with a TOF resolution of 100ps at the system level, combining the high stopping power of BGO or LYSO crystals with the ultrafast emission of cross-luminescent BaF2 or plastic scintillators.
This talk will describe a brainPET project, which will introduce this ground-breaking imaging technologies and AI image reconstruction techniques that push the limits of sensitivity and spatial resolution to better assess brain beta amyloid plaques and characterize mild cognitive impairment with the goal to delay its progression to dementia by detecting unprecedented much smaller amount of beta amyloid in the brain grey matter.
