PHOENIX | Towards pediatric molecular imaging: development of a low-dose and high-performance Total Body PET scanner

Summary
PositrPositron Emission Tomography (PET) constitutes the imaging modality of excellence in nuclear medicine. Conventional whole body (WB) PET are used for both adult and pediatric studies. However, these scanners are not large enough to image the entire infant body, are not optimized in terms of sensitivity imposing the injection of high radiotracer doses and their spatial resolution is as best 3-5 mm at the center of scanner, which is not enough for visualizing small lesions. Moreover, since PET imaging requires the injection of a radiotracer compound, its use is compromised in pediatric due to radiation regulations and patient safety.

To overcome these limitations, I aim to develop an affordable high-performance, high-sensitivity total body (TB)-PET for pediatric imaging. The system, named PHOENIX, targets for a high effective sensitivity of x25-30 the one of clinical WB-PET. To achieve this goal, we propose a large axial scanner of 54.5 cm with a bore diameter of 32 cm to cover all organs of children -without becoming claustrophobic- and, thus, permitting for dynamic multi-organ studies.

For the best cost-performance tradeoff, the PHOENIX detectors would be based on semi-monolithic BGO crystals coupled to SiPMs. This design allows characterizing the light distribution profiles to retrieve photon depth of interaction information (resulting in a uniform image spatial resolution
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101164363
Start date: 01-12-2024
End date: 30-11-2029
Total budget - Public funding: 1 464 841,24 Euro - 1 464 841,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

PositrPositron Emission Tomography (PET) constitutes the imaging modality of excellence in nuclear medicine. Conventional whole body (WB) PET are used for both adult and pediatric studies. However, these scanners are not large enough to image the entire infant body, are not optimized in terms of sensitivity imposing the injection of high radiotracer doses and their spatial resolution is as best 3-5 mm at the center of scanner, which is not enough for visualizing small lesions. Moreover, since PET imaging requires the injection of a radiotracer compound, its use is compromised in pediatric due to radiation regulations and patient safety.

To overcome these limitations, I aim to develop an affordable high-performance, high-sensitivity total body (TB)-PET for pediatric imaging. The system, named PHOENIX, targets for a high effective sensitivity of x25-30 the one of clinical WB-PET. To achieve this goal, we propose a large axial scanner of 54.5 cm with a bore diameter of 32 cm to cover all organs of children -without becoming claustrophobic- and, thus, permitting for dynamic multi-organ studies.

For the best cost-performance tradeoff, the PHOENIX detectors would be based on semi-monolithic BGO crystals coupled to SiPMs. This design allows characterizing the light distribution profiles to retrieve photon depth of interaction information (resulting in a uniform image spatial resolution

Status

SIGNED

Call topic

ERC-2024-STG

Update Date

21-11-2024
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Horizon Europe
HORIZON.1 Excellent Science
HORIZON.1.1 European Research Council (ERC)
HORIZON.1.1.1 Frontier science
ERC-2024-STG ERC STARTING GRANTS