IIHE invited seminar: From calorimetry to medical imaging: a successful know-how transfer

by Dr Matthieu Heller (University of Geneva)

Wednesday 30 May 2018, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

Jean Sacton Seminar room (1G003) (IIHE, VUB)

abstract: Positron-emission tomography (PET) is a medical imaging technique based on the positron-electron annihilation that can provide a three-dimensional representation of the metabolic activity of an organ. Detecting the two back-to-back 511 keV photons requires the same know-how to build a calorimeter for High Energy Physics (HEP) detectors. Therefore, PET detectors have improved significantly since their introduction in every day clinical practice as they benefit from the advance of the research carried on by HEP experiments. The fundamentals of a PET detector will be presented through the AX-PET demonstrator developed at CERN to which the speaker contributed. Furthermore, recent development in crystals, photo detectors and micro-electronics are pushing the limit toward Time-Of-Flight PET (TOF-PET). The timing information provides important improvements compared to standard PET detector in term of signal to noise ratio, sensitivity and image quality. The state-of-the-art developments in this domain will be presented and the road map to reach the 10 ps coincidence resolving time which is the holy-grail for TOF-PET will be presented.