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Cited by 763Medical Imaging Techniques and ApplicationsCardiac Imaging and DiagnosticsRadiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies

Total-Body PET: Maximizing Sensitivity to Create New Opportunities for Clinical Research and Patient Care

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Cherry, Simon R., Jones, Terry, Karp, Joel S., Qi, Jinyi, Moses, William W., Badawi, Ramsey D.·2018·Journal of Nuclear Medicine
DOI 10.2967/jnumed.116.184028PMC PMC5750522
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Abstract

PET is widely considered the most sensitive technique available for noninvasively studying physiology, metabolism, and molecular pathways in the living human being. However, the utility of PET, being a photon-deficient modality, remains constrained by factors including low signal-to-noise ratio, long imaging times, and concerns about radiation dose. Two developments offer the potential to dramatically increase the effective sensitivity of PET. First by increasing the geometric coverage to encompass the entire body, sensitivity can be increased by a factor of about 40 for total-body imaging or a factor of about 4-5 for imaging a single organ such as the brain or heart. The world's first total-body PET/CT scanner is currently under construction to demonstrate how this step change in sensitivity affects the way PET is used both in clinical research and in patient care. Second, there is the future prospect of significant improvements in timing resolution that could lead to further effective sensitivity gains. When combined with total-body PET, this could produce overall sensitivity gains of more than 2 orders of magnitude compared with existing state-of-the-art systems. In this article, we discuss the benefits of increasing body coverage, describe our efforts to develop a first-generation total-body PET/CT scanner, discuss selected application areas for total-body PET, and project the impact of further improvements in time-of-flight PET.

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  • The increase in effective sensitivity enabled by modern SiPM could be translated into an equivalent reduction in injected activity or acquisition time while retaining equal image quality as PMT.

    “The increase in effective sensitivity enabled by modern SiPM could be translated into an equivalent reduction in injected activity or acquisition time while retaining equal image quality as PMT [49,51].”

    From Influences on PET Quantification and Interpretation (2022) · cites this paper as [51]

    The Impact section says increased sensitivity can reduce imaging time or injected activity while maintaining the current signal-to-noise ratio. But it attributes the predicted 40-fold gain to total-body PET, not to modern SiPMs relative to PMTs; the scanner-design section mentions silicon photomultipliers without making that comparison. Page numbers were not provided in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • A gain in counts from improved timing resolution could translate into an SNR gain equivalent to the square root of the relative improvement in timing resolution.

    “Such a gain in counts could translate into an SNR gain that is equivalent to the square root of the relative improvement in timing resolution [49,51].”

    From Influences on PET Quantification and Interpretation (2022) · cites this paper as [51]

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Cherry, S. R., Jones, T., Karp, J. S., Qi, J., Moses, W. W., & Badawi, R. D.
Affiliations
  • University of California Davis Medical Center (US)
  • University of Pennsylvania (US)
  • University of California, Davis (US)
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)
ORCID
Venue
Journal of Nuclear Medicine
Publisher
Society of Nuclear Medicine
Published
2017-09-21
Volume
59
Issue
1
Pages
3-12
ISSN
  • 0161-5505 (ISSN-L)
  • 2159-662X
DOI
10.2967/jnumed.116.184028
PMC
PMC5750522
OpenAlex
W2758460516
Cited by
763
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 77 · 2025: 86 · 2024: 106 · 2023: 105 · 2022: 83 · 2021: 104 · 2020: 113 · 2019: 61 · 2018: 24 · 2017: 2
FWCI
41.98
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Journal of Nuclear Medicine (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • Siemens Healthineers
  • National Institutes of Health (P51OD011107)
  • University of California, Davis
  • National Cancer Institute (R01CA206187)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Cardiac Imaging and Diagnostics
  • Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Radiation › Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies
Keywords
total-body PET, PET/CT scanner, imaging sensitivity, timing resolution, time-of-flight PET, radiation dose, signal-to-noise ratio
MeSH terms
Patient Care, Humans, Research, Positron-Emission Tomography, Whole Body Imaging, Multimodal Imaging

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