ABSTRACT
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a noninvasive medical imaging tool widely used in both clinical and preclinical research. PET has proven its value in several areas such as cancer diagnosing and staging, assessing neurological diseases, myocardium viability evaluation in cardiology, as well as radiotherapy and chemotherapy monitoring [1–4]. In recent years, PET is also being actively used in small animal research using new molecular probes labeled with positron-emitting radionuclides. Applications using small animal PET include cell trafficking as cancer cells metastasize to different organs [5–8], gene delivery and expression in living animals [9,10], and low levels of endogenous messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) [11,12]. Advanced instrumentation, particularly high-performance detector designs, would help PET improve its image quality and enhance its molecular sensitivity for both clinical and small animal research. This chapter will focus on four aspects of the recent developments of high-performance PET detector designs: (1) high photon detection sensitivity, (2) improved spatial resolution, (3) depth-of-interaction (DoI) design, and (4) time-of-flight (ToF) PET and silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs).
