Speaker
Description
The shift in medicine towards early diagnosis and prevention requires higher sensitivity and specificity in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging. Emerging long axial PET scanners with Time-of-Flight (TOF) technology offer promising solutions. PET using ultra-fast gamma-ray detection, such as through the Cherenkov effect or with short and fast scintillator crystals, has the potential to improve TOF PET imaging and overall sensitivity while reducing the cost of the imaging system compared to conventional pure scintillator-based PET scanners. In TOF PET detectors with fast gamma-ray detection, another simplification becomes possible: the axial geometry of the standard scanner can be replaced by planar detector modules, making the PET apparatus flexible and potentially cheaper. The talk will review recent developments of detectors for medical imaging, report on proof-of-principle experiments and Monte-Carlo-based feasibility studies and optimizations, and discuss the tight connection between instrumentation for particle and nuclear physics and advances in instrumentation for medical imaging.
