Advanced micro-PET/CT/RT System for Translational Radiation Oncology Applications

项目摘要 对于放射治疗（RT），精确地定义和递送具有靶向组织的辐射的能力。 根据肿瘤对RT的生物学反应调整治疗计划， 任何成功的临床治疗和转化研究的关键。为了改进目前的RT协议， 发展新的关联理论策略，关键是利用这些技术进行翻译关联理论研究， 类似于临床RT实践中应用的程序，以便研究方法和结果 临床相关，并可有效地转化为临床研究和应用。这个项目的目标 建立实用和先进的PET/CT图像引导放射治疗（IGRT）能力， 翻译RT研究。这个项目的意义和影响是非常清楚的：它将克服一个关键的 改变目前几乎完全依赖解剖CT的RT研究实践的技术障碍 从功能图像引导的图像到了解实际肿瘤生物学状态的功能图像， 功能该项目的成功预计将对改善和加快 翻译RT研究和深远的好处，以加强癌症治疗。研究的目的是 开发先进的动物PET，并将其与现有的micro-CT/RT集成，评估和改善 通过体模成像和系统建模实验进行性能测试，并进行试点动物研究 测试PET/CT图像引导平移放射肿瘤学应用的能力。新开发的 PET探测器技术将用于克服技术挑战，以实现高灵敏度（23%） 以及RT研究中小尺寸肿瘤定量成像所需的高、均匀分辨率（1 mm）。 本项目拟开发的新型成像技术也要切实可行，才能被采用 对于其他微型CT/RT系统，没有基本的技术困难。

Project Summary For radiation therapy (RT), the capability to precisely define and delivery radiations with the targeted distribution and dose level and to adapt the treatment plan based on the tumor biological response to RT is the key for any successful clinical therapy and translational research. For improving the current RT protocols and develop new novel RT strategies, it is critical to conduct translational RT researches with the technologies and procedures analogous to those applied in clinical RT practice so that the research methods and results are clinically relevant and can be effectively translated to clinical studies and applications. The goal of this project is to establish practical and advanced PET/CT image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) capability for translational RT researches. The significance and impact of this project are very clear: it will overcome a critical technical obstacle to transform the current practice of RT research that is almost solely relied on anatomic CT images to the one guided by functional images with the knowledge of actual tumor biological status and function. The success of this project is expected to have lasting impact to improving and accelerating the translational RT research and profound benefits to enhancing the cancer treatment. The research aims to develop an advanced animal PET and integrate it with an existing micro-CT/RT, evaluate and improve the performance through experiments of phantom imaging and system modeling, and conduct pilot animal studies to test the capability PET/CT image-guided translational radiation oncology applications. The newly developed PET detector technologies will be applied to overcome technical challenges to achieve high sensitivity (23%) and high, uniform resolution (1 mm) required by the quantitative imaging of small size tumor for RT studies. The novel imaging technology to be developed by this project should also be practical so that it can be adopted for other micro-CT/RT systems without fundamental technical difficulties.