Total-Body PET: Maximizing Sensitivity to Create New Opportunities for Clinical Research and Patient Care
Total-Body PET: Maximizing Sensitivity to Create New Opportunities for Clinical Research and Patient Care
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DOI：
10.2967/jnumed.116.184028
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发表时间：
2018-01-01
影响因子：
9.3
通讯作者：
Badawi, Ramsey D.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Cherry, Simon R.;Jones, Terry;Badawi, Ramsey D.
PET被广泛认为是无创研究人体生理、代谢和分子途径的最灵敏的技术。然而，PET作为一种光子缺陷模式，仍然受到低信噪比、长成像时间和辐射剂量等因素的限制。两项进展提供了显著提高PET有效灵敏度的潜力。首先，通过增加几何覆盖范围以覆盖整个身体，对于全身成像，灵敏度可以提高约40倍，对于单个器官（如大脑或心脏）成像，灵敏度可以提高约4-5倍。世界上第一台全身PET/CT扫描仪目前正在建造中，以展示灵敏度的这一步骤变化如何影响PET在临床研究和患者护理中的使用方式。其次，未来在时序分辨率方面有重大改进的前景，这可能导致进一步有效的灵敏度增益。当与全身PET相结合时，与现有的最先进的系统相比，这可以产生超过2个数量级的总体灵敏度增益。在本文中，我们讨论了增加人体覆盖率的好处，描述了我们为开发第一代全身PET/CT扫描仪所做的努力，讨论了全身PET的选定应用领域，并预测了进一步改进飞行时间PET的影响。
PET is widely considered the most sensitive technique available for noninvasively studying physiology, metabolism, and molecular pathways in the living human being. However, the utility of PET, being a photon-deficient modality, remains constrained by factors including low signal-to-noise ratio, long imaging times, and concerns about radiation dose. Two developments offer the potential to dramatically increase the effective sensitivity of PET. First by increasing the geometric coverage to encompass the entire body, sensitivity can be increased by a factor of about 40 for total-body imaging or a factor of about 4-5 for imaging a single organ such as the brain or heart. The world's first total-body PET/CT scanner is currently under construction to demonstrate how this step change in sensitivity affects the way PET is used both in clinical research and in patient care. Second, there is the future prospect of significant improvements in timing resolution that could lead to further effective sensitivity gains. When combined with total-body PET, this could produce overall sensitivity gains of more than 2 orders of magnitude compared with existing state-of-the-art systems. In this article, we discuss the benefits of increasing body coverage, describe our efforts to develop a first-generation total-body PET/CT scanner, discuss selected application areas for total-body PET, and project the impact of further improvements in time-of-flight PET.