Quantum Entanglement Tomography for enhanced medical imaging

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This project will enable the commercialisation of a new concept for positron imaging which utilises quantum entanglement - Quantum Entanglement Tomography (QET). The work will fund a new collaboration between the University of Edinburgh (UoE) and Kromek, one of the leading UK based manufacturers of particle detector products. The new collaboration has the potential to enable new high-quality and low-cost PET imaging detectors. In PET imaging a patient is injected with sugar containing a radioactive atom, usually a flourine atom. When this atom decays 2 photons are emitted which come out in opposite directions back-to-back. By detecting many of these 2 photon events an image of the source can be reconstucted. PET imaging is used for many important clinical diagnoses such as identifying cancerous tissue and diagnosing Alzheimer's disease. We (UoE) have developed and patented a new technique (QET) which will improve upon the sharpness and contrast of the PET image using quantum information. There will be significant cost benefits in adopting this approach. Better imaging will lead to more appropriate treatment, resulting in fewer futile surgical interventions and improved therapy choices for the increasingly expensive chemotherapies applied by oncologists. Apart from oncology applications, there is an increasing use of PET imaging in neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. This technical developments in this project would allow smaller and weaker clinical features to be seen, permitting earlier and more reliable diagnosis of disease and disease progression.The new quantum-information based medical imaging method will be commercialised with the CZT based detector systems developed by Kromek. These state-of-the-art photon detectors have close to ideal detection characteristics to accurately determine and exploit this quantum information.