Center for Particles and Fields Seminar

Prof. Stan Majewski, University of Michigan

"State of the Art and the Next Generation Dedicated Brain PET for the Era of Precision Medicine"

4:00pm, RLM 9.222

Abstract: PET is an excellent proven modality in imaging cancer, dementia and many other brain diseases. However this nuclear medicine modality suffers from the stigma of radiation exposure to all organs of the human body as the injection of the radioactive imaging agent is systemic and distributed through the blood stream, therefore independently of the organ of interest and the rationale for the scan, all the organs are impacted. We are approaching the era when "one dose fits all" will not be accepted anymore. The injected dose of imaging agent will have to be justified/calculated for each imaging task and each individual. In general, due to the public's and also physicians’ concerns, to continue playing its important role, the applied doses in nuclear medicine a.k.a. molecular imaging will have to be lowered in the future by a substantial factor (factor 10 and even more) without sacrificing the quality of the diagnostic information. This will have to be achieved by combined optimization of the scanners, imaging protocols, data processing and interpretation, and reconstruction algorithms. Fortunately, due to the recent technological breakthroughs in PET instrumentation using solid state based technology and progress with 3D image reconstruction algorithms as well as with dynamic/kinetic data analysis algorithms, it became possible to design MRI-compatible Time-of-Flight (TOF) capable high resolution brain PET imagers with an order of magnitude higher sensitivity in brain imaging than the standard whole body PET scanner. In addition, with the excellent now achievable TOF resolutions of 200 psec FWHM, an accompanying standard CT scan providing attenuation map for the PET reconstructions (and that adds to the radiation dose burden) may be not necessary. Research groups and companies around the world are working on developing dedicated brain PET imagers. Examples are efforts in Europe (Spain, Italy), USA, Japan, Korea and China. An AMPET project in USA funded through the NIH Brain Initiative program successfully reached the level of readiness for dissemination and is awaiting decision on the second phase funding.