About this Research Topic
PET examinations are a relevant part of clinical routine in treatment and diagnosis in nuclear medicine. Further, PET is an important tool to study metabolism, physiology, and neurological processes to improve our understanding of the healthy and diseased human organism. Impressive improvement of scanner performance has been achieved by continuous efforts of the scientific community, such as increasing axial length, new detector module designs, new materials, and components, implementing and improving time-of-flight detection, multimodal hybrid scanners, additional external probes, and advanced computing methods such as machine learning for data corrections, image reconstruction, and processing. The aforementioned advances aimed at improving sensitivity, spatial resolution, timing resolution, and quantification accuracy, led to a major impact on the application of PET scanners to diagnosis, research, treatment monitoring, and radiotracer development.
The efforts to broaden the use of PET are two-fold. They include on one hand research on reducing the procedure costs while maintaining or even improving the system’s performance and, on the other hand, the development of highest-performance systems. Methodologies for achieving this goal are the use of new materials, alternative scintillators, and solid state detectors; the development of synchronized external modules to improve the imaging performance; the development of organ dedicated systems and the development of systems with significantly increased axial length. Furthermore, new advances in the reconstruction process and its algorithms would impact in the PET systems used for research.
Future PET systems resulting from these research and development activities will allow to reduce dose exposure and scan time for clinical applications, potentially reducing the total cost of individual scans. They will also be better suited to study pathologies affecting different organs or metabolic processes in several organs simultaneously and they will allow for completely new applications and measuring protocols.
The goal of the present research topic is to cover the main areas of research related to the improvement of PET scanners, focused on their applications in clinical routine and research. This will include contributions in the following research field: improving the spatial resolution using alternative detector designs, new materials, or external additional probes measuring in coincidence with the scanner; reducing the system costs by alternative detector designs; improving the sensitivity and time resolution of scanners; increasing image information content and/or reducing total scan costs by improving image reconstruction or developing new scan protocols to be used with new radiotracers or to allow low dose or reduced acquisition-time scans.
This research topic covers relevant aspects of technical development and research on approaches for performance improvement, including Monte-Carlo simulations of new scanner configurations improving performance and/or decreasing the cost of devices, including large axial FOV scanners and total-body PET; optimisation of detector modules and/or the development of add-on probes aimed at increasing the resolutions in terms of space, energy and time; studies addressing the improvement of hybrid scanners, both simulated (in the case of new and/or optimised configurations) and with measurements with hybrid scanners and prototypes; new measuring strategies and protocols developed to increase the quality of the reconstructed image when using the aforementioned scanners or to collect additional image information; and improvements in image reconstruction and image post-processing using machine learning techniques.
The efforts to broaden the use of PET are two-fold. They include on one hand research on reducing the procedure costs while maintaining or even improving the system’s performance and, on the other hand, the development of highest-performance systems. Methodologies for achieving this goal are the use of new materials, alternative scintillators, and solid state detectors; the development of synchronized external modules to improve the imaging performance; the development of organ dedicated systems and the development of systems with significantly increased axial length. Furthermore, new advances in the reconstruction process and its algorithms would impact in the PET systems used for research.
Future PET systems resulting from these research and development activities will allow to reduce dose exposure and scan time for clinical applications, potentially reducing the total cost of individual scans. They will also be better suited to study pathologies affecting different organs or metabolic processes in several organs simultaneously and they will allow for completely new applications and measuring protocols.
The goal of the present research topic is to cover the main areas of research related to the improvement of PET scanners, focused on their applications in clinical routine and research. This will include contributions in the following research field: improving the spatial resolution using alternative detector designs, new materials, or external additional probes measuring in coincidence with the scanner; reducing the system costs by alternative detector designs; improving the sensitivity and time resolution of scanners; increasing image information content and/or reducing total scan costs by improving image reconstruction or developing new scan protocols to be used with new radiotracers or to allow low dose or reduced acquisition-time scans.
This research topic covers relevant aspects of technical development and research on approaches for performance improvement, including Monte-Carlo simulations of new scanner configurations improving performance and/or decreasing the cost of devices, including large axial FOV scanners and total-body PET; optimisation of detector modules and/or the development of add-on probes aimed at increasing the resolutions in terms of space, energy and time; studies addressing the improvement of hybrid scanners, both simulated (in the case of new and/or optimised configurations) and with measurements with hybrid scanners and prototypes; new measuring strategies and protocols developed to increase the quality of the reconstructed image when using the aforementioned scanners or to collect additional image information; and improvements in image reconstruction and image post-processing using machine learning techniques.
Keywords: PET, sensitivity, probe, protocol, spatial resolution, meta-materials, scintillating fibre, scintillation crystal, solid state detectors, time coincidence, TBP, LAFOV
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