Development of a Low Cost High Performance Animal PET

描述(申请人提供)：该项目的长期目标是加速癌症、药物开发、基因表达和治疗领域的研究和发现，方法是(A)提高成像分辨率、图像质量、灵敏度和功能，以及(B)大幅降低动物PET的成本，以便更多的生物实验室能够负担得起这项有用的分子成像技术。动物模型，如基因工程小鼠，已被证明是这些领域的首选工具。当用PET对生化和制药过程进行成像和活体研究时，这些工具具有更大的价值。然而，高分辨率的啮齿动物PET太贵了，大多数生物学家负担不起(55万-75万美元)。其次，应进一步提高成像分辨率，以探测小鼠的较小结构，检测较小的病变和监测较小的肿瘤。第三，自诞生以来，动物PET的发展一直只专注于分辨率，而牺牲了检测灵敏度和成本。灵敏度的折衷主要是由于其技术成本较高，采用减小轴向视场(AFOV)来使用更少的探测器。然而，随着分辨率的提高(探测器像素更小，但像素更多)，为了保持每个探测器像素的统计质量不变，对更多计数(灵敏度)的需求变得更加迫切。因此，除非检测灵敏度也得到提高，否则无法实现更高分辨率的全部好处。此外，灵敏度对于探测较低水平的生化活动和提高产量是有用的。我们建议以一半的成本开发一种动物PET，同时提供比当前商业系统更高的分辨率，以及2.6-7倍的灵敏度。它的AFOV还增加了55%，以增加吞吐量，并以更均匀的图像质量在一个床位对整个转基因小鼠进行成像，并便于在时间上成像全身动态变化。大的AFOV和超高分辨率允许对动脉输入功能进行成像，以量化示踪剂动力学。这一高性能、低成本的系统基于我们的低成本PET探测器设计、新颖高效的探测器生产工程技术和电子技术。该系统还使我们能够研究一种新的三维数据采集和重建方法，从而可以获取所有4个圆周率立体角的发射线(“完整的三维数据”)。该方法可以进一步改善图像质量和三维图像重建过程。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of the project is to accelerate research and discoveries in the areas of cancer, drug development, gene expression and therapy by (a) improving the imaging resolution, image quality, sensitivity and functionality, and (b) substantially lowering the cost of animal PET so more biology laboratories can afford this useful molecular imaging technology. Animal models, such as genetically engineered mice, have proven to be the tools of choice in these areas. These tools have even greater value when the biochemical and pharmaceutical processes are imaged and studied in vivo with PET. However, a rodent-PET with high resolution is too expensive to be within the reach of most biologists ($550,000-$750,000). Secondly, the imaging resolution should be improved further to probe smaller structures in mice, to detect smaller lesions and monitor smaller tumors. Thirdly, since inception, animal PET development has always been focusing solely on resolution at the expenses of detection sensitivity and cost. The compromise in sensitivity is mainly due to the high cost of its technology by resorting to decreasing the axial field of view (AFOV) to use fewer detectors. However, as resolution improves (smaller detector pixels but more pixels), the need for more counts (sensitivity) becomes more acute so as to maintain the same statistical quality per detector pixel. Hence, unless detection sensitivity is also improved, the full benefit of higher resolution cannot be realized. Furthermore, sensitivity is useful for probing lower levels of biochemical activities and to improve throughput. We propose to develop an animal PET at half the cost, while providing higher resolution than current commercial system, plus a 2.6-7 times higher sensitivity. It also has a 55% larger AFOV to increase throughput and to image the whole transgenic mouse in one bed position with more uniform image quality and to facilitate imaging wholebody dynamic changes in time. The large AFOV and ultrahigh resolution allow arterial input function to be imaged for quantifying tracer dynamics. This high performance low cost system is based on our low-cost PET detector design, novel efficient detector-production engineering technology, and electronic technology. The system also enable us to the study of a new 3-D data-acquisition and reconstruction method, whereby emission lines from all 4-pi-solid-angles can be acquired ("complete 3-D data"). This method may further improve image quality and the 3-D image reconstruction process.