Improving PET With HD?PET + Time of Flight

Using Time of Flight (TOF) information to augment image reconstruction in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) was first proposed in the early 1980's soon after the invention of PET. While a number of TOF PET systems were built and used in clinical research, the availability of a suitable scintillator limited the clinical application of TOF PET. The discovery of LSO now provides a scintillator with both the stopping power and time resolution to make TOF PET clinically viable. As in conventional Positron Emission Tomography, the time of flight PET camera encircles the patient with multiple rings of radiation detectors. Each pair of detectors measures the number of positron decays that lie along the line joining them.