Development of innovative detectors for Positron Emission Tomography
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a powerful nuclear imaging technique used widely nowadays in oncology, cardiology and neuropsychiatry.
The PET technology consists in injecting the patient with a radioactive tracer, of interest to probe a biochemical process. The decay of the tracer emits a positron which annihilate with an electron. As a result of the annihilation, two photons with energy 511 keV are emitted back-to-back and registered by the dedicated detectors. The line-of-response connects the two points where photons are detected and allow to reconstruct the tracer distribution when large statistics events have been accumulated.