UNIPI Team Leader: Prof. Nicola Belcari, Dipartimento di Fisica

Multi-parametric molecular imaging (MMI) is an imaging modality largely based on clinical PET that allowed many of the recent discoveries on new molecular probes and the associated models. MMI is a fundamental pillar of the so-called personalised medicine that is expected to allow the delivery of “the right treatment to the right patient at the right time”. There is a general consensus on the necessity of increasing MMI sensitivity by at least a factor of ten in order to exploit its full potential.

This project aims at providing a new type of time-of-flight (TOF) PET demonstrator that is expected to drive such a big leap in sensitivity. In TOF-PET, the timing information of each annihilation photon coming from the source under examination is used to improve the statistical information regarding the position of the source itself. It can be demonstrated that TOF can introduce a gain in the PET sensitivity that is approximately proportional to the inverse of the resolving time of its photon detectors. Therefore, one way to increase sensitivity is by improving the TOF resolution.

This project includes developments on both TOF-PET hardware and software aimed at improving the TOF resolution beyond the level achievable today with analogue SiPMs. A PET prototype will be constructed based on the emerging type of photosensor devices known as multichannel digital SiPM and the latest scintillating materials and photonic crystals technologies. A scalable acquisition system will be developed to handle the high data rate produced by each detector.

The system will provide timing performances beyond the state of the art, well below 300-400 ps, which will translate into higher imaging sensitivity, higher contrast, lower noise, faster convergence and improved robustness with respect to state of the art PET and TOF-PET alternatives.

Coordinator:

University of Pisa, Italy

Partners:

• AGE Scientific s.r.l., Italy
• Universiteit Gent, Belgium
• Molecubes NV, Belgium
• École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Start date: 30/03/2018

End date: 29/03/2021

Project cost: 2.313.733 €

Grant amount: 1,119,500 €

UNIPI role: coordinator

Project website: https://www.utofpet.com/