Sept - State of the art of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) technology and current challenges

A brief historical review of Time-of-Flight (TOF) Positron Emission Tomography (PET) will be presented, including the recent development in silicon photomultipliers (SiPM), which resulted in improved TOF performance. The principles of TOF PET physics and a discussion of the technical and clinical advantages of TOF PET compared to conventional PET will be presented: the concept of time resolution and its effect on TOF gain in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), together with other properties such as reconstruction robustness to inconsistent data, convergence, and convergence speed. Other advanced reconstruction methods and innovations will be discussed, such as resolution recovery methods, data driven methods for motion correction, and the recent introduction of deep learning in different aspects of PET. Speaker: Maurizio Conti, PET Physics and Reconstruction, Siemens Healthineers