A Lower Cost High Resolution Time-of-flight PET Detector Development

PET成像可用于加强对人类生物或病理功能、基因的研究 癌症的表达/治疗、药物开发研究和通过本地化提高临床诊断 因此，提高了分期和治疗计划的准确性。飞行时间(TOF)PET技术 根据TOF的不同，有可能将有效的PET检测灵敏度提高数倍 计时分辨率。目前临床上使用L(Y)SO闪烁晶体的PET报告TOF分辨率为650-1200 PS可能会将有效的PET灵敏度提高2-3倍。我们的初步研究表明，飞行时间 可实现300-350ps的时间分辨率，从而潜在地将有效的PET灵敏度提高4-6 因此，全身扫描可以在5分钟内完成，而不是30分钟，脑部/心脏扫描只需1分钟。 利用光电倍增管象限共享(PQS)探测器的设计，我们成功地开发了人类 具有2.4 mm空间分辨率的PET探测器，同时将光电倍增管(PMT)成本降低75%， 与目前临床上使用的4-6.5 mm分辨率的PET相比，使用的PMT要多4倍。PMT是一项主要成本， 宠物。我们还发现，探测器的内部结构提供了比电流更多的光输出 探测器设计，这可能会将TOF时间分辨率从目前的650-1200 ps提高到320-350 ps PS，从而潜在地将PET的有效检测灵敏度提高4-6倍。其次，我们构思了一种 一种简单的电子方法，用于在像PET这样的大系统中工作，该系统 可将临床PET的分辨率提高到1.6-2 mm，或解码两层探测器中的相互作用深度。 由于探测器的TOF时间分辨率可能更好，将由我们的团队或 未来，需要更好、更快的TOF探测器电子设备来充分实现未来的TOF时间分辨率 这些更好的探测器；因此，我们也建议开发更好的TOF-PET电子学。 我们还将采用开发的探测器生产技术来构建TOF-PET测试平台，使用 在这个项目中开发的技术，以量化TOF成像对病变检测的有效性 患者大小、TOF分辨率、空间分辨率和不同病变与组织对比度的功能。 长期目标是(A)开发低成本、高分辨率、高灵敏度的TOF PET或TOF- PET-CT用于早期癌症检测和更准确的癌症分期，(B)缩短全身扫描时间 从30分钟到5分钟，以改善患者舒适度，减少PET图像中的患者运动伪影，以及 为了减少由于病人运动导致的PET和CT图像之间的配准错误，(C)降低成本高昂的 TOF-PET，并显著增加患者吞吐量，以降低临床PET扫描的高昂成本 为患者和我们的社会提供更好的负担能力，以缓解日益增长的医疗保健和高科技成本 医学，以及(D)超高分辨率和1分钟扫描大脑或其他区域打开新的视窗 脑功能、心理和神经元反应、动态癌症示踪剂和多示踪剂癌症成像。

PET imaging can be deployed to enhance research on human biological or pathological functions, gene expression/therapy for cancer, drug-development research and improving clinical diagnosis by localizing tumors, thus improving the accuracy of staging and treatment planning. Time-of-flight (TOF) PET technology has the potential to increase the effective PET detection sensitivity by multiple times, depending on the TOF timing resolution. Current clinical PET with L(Y)SO scintillation crystals reported TOF resolution of 650-1200 ps that potentially increase the effective PET sensitivity by 2-3 times. Our preliminary study shows that a TOF timing resolution of 300-350 ps is achievable, thereby potentially enhancing the effective PET sensitivity by 4-6 times, so wholebody can be scanned in 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes and a brain/heart scan in 1 minute. Using the photomultiplier-quadrant-sharing (PQS) detector design we have successfully developed human PET detectors with 2.4-mm spatial resolution while reducing photomultiplier (PMT) cost by 75% concurrently, compared to the 4-6.5 mm resolution in present clinical PET using 4 times more PMT. PMT is a major cost in PET. We also found that the internal structure of our detector provides more light-output than the current detector designs, which could potentially improve TOF time resolution from the current 650-1200 ps to 320-350 ps, thereby potentially improving PET's effective detection sensitivity by 4-6 times. Secondly, we conceived a simple electronic method to make a "phoswich" detector concept work in a large system such as PET, which may improve resolution of clinical PET to 1.6-2 mm, or to decode the depth-of-interaction in 2-layer detectors. Due to the potentially better TOF time resolution of detectors to be developed by our group or others in the future, better and faster TOF detector electronics are needed to fully realize the future TOF timing resolution of these better detectors; Hence, we also propose to develop better TOF-PET electronics. We will also adopt the detector production technology developed to build a TOF-PET testing platform, using the technology developed in this project, to quantify the effectiveness of TOF imaging for lesion detection as a function of patient sizes, TOF resolution, spatial resolution and different lesion-to-tissue contrast ratios. The long-term goals are (a) to develop lower-cost, higher-resolution, higher-sensitivity TOF PET or TOF- PET-CT for earlier cancer detection and more accurate cancer staging, (b) to shorten wholebody scan time from 30 minutes to 5 minutes to improve patient comfort, to reduce patient-motion artifacts in PET images, and to reduce misregistration between PET and CT images caused by patient motion, (c) to lower the high cost of TOF-PET and to significantly increase patient throughput to reduce the high cost of clinical PET scans for better affordability to patients and our society to alleviate the ever increasing cost of health care and high-tech medicine, and (d) ultrahigh resolution and 1-minute scan of brain or other areas open new windows seeing brain function, psychological and neuronal response, dynamic cancer tracers and multi-tracer cancer imaging.