Current Status of PET Technology

Recent technological advancements have led to the development of new PET instrumentation that provides clinical images of whole-body surveys with high signal-to-noise ratio with scan times of 10–15 min. In this chapter, we describe the current status of modern PET/CT systems and the underlying technological developments. Our focus will be on hardware developments ranging from improved Lu-based scintillators, through new photosensor technology with an emphasis on silicon photomultipliers, to new detector designs meant to improve system spatial and timing resolution as well as sensitivity. We briefly describe more advanced image generation methods that aim to produce more accurate images with high signal-to-noise ratio while utilizing the enhanced information achieved by the new hardware.

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