Improving quantification of weak sources in positron emission tomography

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Positron emission tomography, or PET, is a nuclear medicine imaging technique which yields images of the biological distribution of a radioactive tracer that has been injected into a subject. The most common clinical use of PET is in diagnosing and staging cancer because of its excellent sensitivity for detecting metastatic disease. Unfortunately, PET is a very expensive imaging method because of the high cost of both the PET scanner itself and of the cyclotron produced radioactive dyes. Improvements in PET system design that reduce per-patient cost can lead to more widespread use of PET and consequently improve the treatment of cancer patients through more accurate staging. These system improvements are accomplished through basic research into new detector designs, processing electronics and data handling algorithms in engineering and physics research laboratories. This Discovery grant will fund a research program focusing on developing and testing new technologies for PET imaging. In the proposed research we will examine the sources of loss of image quality and quantification at low count rates in current generation PET scanners both through measurements and computer simulations. We will use these results to aid in the design and construction of novel high sensitivity detectors for PET. Increasing the sensitivity of PET detectors will lead to expansion of the use of PET in applications that have stringent limits of the amount of injected activity, such as pediatric imaging or in research studies.