Development of tachyon time-of-flight PET cameras

Peng, Qiyu; Moses, W.W.; Zhang, Xuezhu; Qi, Jinyi; Zhao, Zhixiang; Huang, Qiu; Zhu, Yicheng; Sui, Tengjie; Yang, M.; Xu, Jianfeng

doi:10.1109/nssmic.2016.8069607

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Halide scintillators such as CeBr 3 and LaBr 3 scintillators provide very good properties for fast timing resolution [105–109]. The light output of these is ~2–3 fold higher than LYSO, and has a primary decay time of ~16 ns, resulting in ultra-fast timing resolution, as good as ~ 75–80 ps in recent experiments with fast SiPMs [110]. However, apart from these ideal scintillation properties, LaBr 3 and CeBr 3 suffer from much lower stopping power compared to Lu scintillators.…”

Section: Detectorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The lower sensitivity can be offset by using longer crystals, but this results in poorer spatial resolution due to depth-of-interaction effects, and introduces larger variability in scintillation light propagation time that offsets the intrinsically fast timing properties of LaBr 3 and CeBr 3 . Because of these, in addition to the hygroscopic nature of halide scintillators, LaBr 3 and CeBr 3 have only been used in research systems [110, 111].…”

Section: Detectorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The sustained improvements in time-of-flight performance will likely continue to provide some of the most significant advances in PET technology for clinical imaging. Time-of-flight performance of commercially available scanners has improved substantially in the past two years, with several manufacturers now boasting timing resolutions of 300 – 350 ps [70, 84, 85], nearly a two-fold improvement from five years prior, along with prototype systems with ~ 100 ps timing resolution [110]. It is unlikely that next generation time-of-flight scanners will deviate from using Lu-based scintillators in the near future, due to their excellent scintillation properties and their availability through high-quality mass production, although further refinements in the crystal properties, such as through co-doping, may be possible.…”

Section: Future Pet Scannersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Innovations in Instrumentation for Positron Emission Tomography

Berg

Cherry

2018

Seminars in Nuclear Medicine

101

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PET scanners are sophisticated and highly sensitive biomedical imaging devices that can produce highly quantitative images showing the 3-dimensional distribution of radiotracers inside the body. PET scanners are commonly integrated with x-ray CT or MRI scanners in hybrid devices that can provide both molecular imaging (PET) and anatomical imaging (CT or MRI). Despite decades of development, significant opportunities still exist to make major improvements in the performance of PET systems for a variety of clinical and research tasks. These opportunities stem from new ideas and concepts, as well as a range of enabling technologies and methodologies. In this paper, we review current state of the art in PET instrumentation, detectors and systems, describe the major limitations in PET as currently practiced, and offer our own personal insights into some of the recent and emerging technological innovations that we believe will impact the field. Our focus is on the technical aspects of PET imaging, specifically detectors and system design, and the opportunity and necessity to move closer to PET systems for diagnostic patient use and in vivo biomedical research that truly approach the physical performance limits while remaining mindful of imaging time, radiation dose, and cost. However, other key endeavors, which are not covered here, including innovations in reconstruction and modeling methodology, radiotracer development, and expanding the range of clinical and research applications, also will play an equally important, if not more important, role in defining the future of the field.

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Section: Detectorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Detectorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Future Pet Scannersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Innovations in Instrumentation for Positron Emission Tomography

Berg

Cherry

2018

Seminars in Nuclear Medicine

101

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“…Lastly, the timing calibration correction was previously described as a per-crystal offset, combined with a per-crystal linear energy time walk term, for every crystal in the system (Freese et al 2017a). Due to increasing amounts of non-linear energy time walk on the leading-edge discriminator timing pickoff as we increase the amount of low-energy events, we add an additional log-energy time walk correction term, which has been shown to improve the timing calibration correction of low-energy interactions (Peng et al 2017). This method was chosen because it delivered superior time walk correction performance when compared with linear-energy time walk correction methods, especially for lower energy interactions that are predominant in intercrystal scatter interactions.…”

Section: Calibrations and Corrections For Low-energy Photon Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intercrystal scatter studies for a 1 mm³ resolution clinical PET system prototype

et al. 2019

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Positron emission tomography (PET) systems designed with multiplexed readout do not usually have the capability to resolve individual intercrystal scatter (ICS) interactions, leading to interaction mispositioning that degrades spatial resolution and contrast. A 3D position sensitive scintillation detector capable of individual ICS readout has been designed and incorporated into a 1 mm3 resolution clinical PET system used for locoregional imaging. Incorporating ICS events increases photon sensitivity by 51.5% compared to using only photoelectric events. A Compton scatter angle error minimization algorithm is used to estimate the first ICS interaction location for accurate line-of-response pairing of coincident photons. An optimal scatter angle error threshold of 15 degrees is used to discard ICS events with a high mismatch between energy-derived and position-derived intercrystal scatter angles. Finally, positioning rather than rejecting ICS events boosts peak contrast to noise ratio by 8.1%, and allows for an equivalent dose reduction of 12% while maintaining equivalent image quality.

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“…Details of the system configuration and characterization have been reported previously (Peng et al 2015). A second-generation system using digital photomultiplier detectors is under development to further improve the timing performance (Peng and Moses 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lesion detection and quantification performance of the Tachyon-I time-of-flight PET scanner: phantom and human studies

et al. 2018

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The first generation Tachyon PET (Tachyon-I) is a demonstration single-ring PET scanner that reaches a coincidence timing resolution of 314 ps using LSO scintillator crystals coupled to conventional photomultiplier tubes. The objective of this study was to quantify the improvement in both lesion detection and quantification performance resulting from the improved time-of-flight (TOF) capability of the Tachyon-I scanner. We developed a quantitative TOF image reconstruction method for the Tachyon-I and evaluated its TOF gain for lesion detection and quantification. Scans of either a standard NEMA torso phantom or healthy volunteers were used as the normal background data. Separately scanned point source and sphere data were superimposed onto the phantom or human data after accounting for the object attenuation. We used the bootstrap method to generate multiple independent noisy datasets with and without a lesion present. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a channelized hotelling observer (CHO) was calculated for each lesion size and location combination to evaluate the lesion detection performance. The bias versus standard deviation trade-off of each lesion uptake was also calculated to evaluate the quantification performance. The resulting CHO-SNR measurements showed improved performance in lesion detection with better timing resolution. The detection performance was also dependent on the lesion size and location, in addition to the background object size and shape. The results of bias versus noise trade-off showed that the noise (standard deviation) reduction ratio was about 1.1-1.3 over the TOF 500 ps and 1.5-1.9 over the non-TOF modes, similar to the SNR gains for lesion detection. In conclusion, this Tachyon-I PET study demonstrated the benefit of improved time-of-flight capability on lesion detection and ROI quantification for both phantom and human subjects.

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Development of tachyon time-of-flight PET cameras

Cited by 4 publications

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Innovations in Instrumentation for Positron Emission Tomography

Innovations in Instrumentation for Positron Emission Tomography

Intercrystal scatter studies for a 1 mm³ resolution clinical PET system prototype

Lesion detection and quantification performance of the Tachyon-I time-of-flight PET scanner: phantom and human studies

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Development of tachyon time-of-flight PET cameras

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Innovations in Instrumentation for Positron Emission Tomography

Innovations in Instrumentation for Positron Emission Tomography

Intercrystal scatter studies for a 1 mm3 resolution clinical PET system prototype

Lesion detection and quantification performance of the Tachyon-I time-of-flight PET scanner: phantom and human studies

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Intercrystal scatter studies for a 1 mm³ resolution clinical PET system prototype