[Triumf-seminars] TRIUMF Seminar today at 11:00

[TRIUMF Seminars]

Date/Time: Tue 2014-03-18 at 11:00

Location:  Conference Room     

Speaker:   Andrew Goertzen (U Manitoba)

Title:     Development of high resolution scintillation detectors for hybrid PET/MR imaging applications

Abstract: High resolution non-invasive imaging of animal models of human disease has played an important role in furthering our understanding of both the characteristics of the disease being studied and its response to therapeutic interventions. As an imaging modality, positron emission tomography (PET) has exquisite biochemical sensitivity, capable of detecting picomolar concentrations of injected radiotracers, making PET well suited to investigate metabolic processes and receptor/transporter mediated function at the molecular level. A consequence of the high specificity of PET radiotracers is that there is often little anatomical information in the image so that combining PET with an anatomical imaging modality is essential for localization of the PET tracer distribution. Initial successful efforts on hybrid function and anatomical imaging focused on combining PET with X-ray CT imaging. More recently there have been significant efforts to develop hybrid PET/MRI imaging systems due to the advantages of MR over CT as an imaging modality, including excellent soft tissue contrast and no radiation dose. Our group is developing a high resolution PET insert system design to fit within a high field 7T animal MRI system, allowing simultaneous high resolution PET/MR imaging of the laboratory mouse. The overall system dimension, constrained by the size of the MR gradient coil, is limited to an outer diameter of 114 mm. To mitigate depth of interaction effects in the tight ring geometry, the first prototype PET system will use a dual-layer offset LYSO scintillator crystal arrays with 1.27 mm crystal pitch. The crystals will be readout by new silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) photodetectors digitized using the recently developed OpenPET data acquisition system. When complete, this system will enable simultaneous PET/MR imaging of mice with < 1 mm3 spatial resolution.



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