Injecting radioactive substances into the human body sounds crazy, but it heralds an effective technique for obtaining a "snapshot" of the body's physiological functions. This is the charm of nuclear medicine imaging. It integrates nuclear technology, computer, chemistry, physics, biology and other multidisciplinary technologies with medicine for disease diagnosis and treatment, drug development and other purposes. Among them, positron emission computed tomography (PET) is a relatively advanced medical imaging technology in this field, which uses radioactive particles to track diseases (cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, etc.).
Today, the research team from the University of California is working on the world's first full-body PET scanner, which enables 3D imaging of the body. They believe that this more accurate, comprehensive and sensitive imaging technology will promote our understanding of the body, while it can monitor the real-time dynamic response of drugs, toxins and other substances in the body.
Figure A is a conventional PET scanner; Figure B is a full body PET scanner (TB-PET)
Last month, they published the first paper in the "Physics in Medicine and Biology", detailing the early progress of the project. This week, the head of the R&D team, Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi of the University of California, published a paper in the journal Science Translational Medicine, looking ahead to the application prospects of this instrument.
The R&D team named it "EXPLORER, EXtreme Performance LOng REsearch scanneR" and hopes it will be used clinically for the first time in 2018. The official website of Science interviewed the two team leaders. The details are as follows:
Q: What are the advantages of EXPLORER compared to traditional PET?
Ramsey Badawi: At the moment, almost all PET molecular imaging techniques used in the clinic are limited by the small amount of signal acquisition. The body's source of radiation releases the signal in all directions, interfering with the final imaging result.
Simon Cherry: Our full body PET scanners can acquire more signals at the same radiation dose. This means that we can reduce the amount of radiation, and under the premise of reducing the radiation dose by 40 times, EXPLORER can still obtain the semaphore equivalent to the existing PET.
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