Speaker
Description
The shift in modern medicine toward early diagnosis and prevention demands higher sensitivity and specificity in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging. Emerging long-axial PET scanners equipped with Time-of-Flight (TOF) technology offer promising solutions to meet these requirements. PET systems utilizing ultra-fast gamma-ray detection—enabled by the Cherenkov effect or by using short and fast scintillator crystals—have the potential to enhance TOF PET performance, increase overall sensitivity, and reduce system costs compared with conventional pure scintillator-based PET scanners. In TOF PET detectors that incorporate fast gamma-ray detection, an additional simplification becomes feasible: the conventional axial geometry of the scanner can be replaced with planar detector modules, resulting in a more flexible and potentially more cost-effective PET system. This talk will review recent developments in detector technologies for medical imaging, including advances in fast light sensors. It will present proof-of-principle experiments and Monte Carlo–based feasibility studies and optimizations, and highlight the strong synergy between instrumentation for particle and nuclear physics and innovations in medical imaging technologies.
