The United States Department of Energy and National Institutes of Health Collaboration: Medical Care Advances by Discovery in Radiation Detection.

A National Institutes of Health (NIH) and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science virtual workshop on shared general topics was held in July of 2021 and reported on in this publication in January of 2023.

Simulation of a Compton-based detector for low-dose high-resolution time-of-flight positron emission tomography.

Two major challenges in time-of-flight positron emission tomography (TOF-PET) are low spatial resolution and high radioactive dose to the patient, both of which result from limitations in detection technology rather than fundamental physics. A new type of TOF-PET detector employing low-atomic number (low-Z) scintillation media and large-area, high-resolution photodetectors to record Compton scattering locations in the detector has been proposed as a promising alternative, but the minimum technical requirements for such a system have not yet been established. Here we present a simulation study evaluating the potential of a proposed low-Z detection medium, linear alkylbenzene (LAB) doped with a switchable molecular recorder, for next-generation TOF-PET detection.

Low-Dose High-Resolution TOF-PET Using Ionization-activated Multi-State Low-Z Detector Media.

We propose PET scanners using low atomic number media that undergo a persistent local change of state along the paths of the Compton recoil electrons. Measurement of the individual scattering locations and angles, deposited energies, and recoil electron directions allows using the kinematical constraints of the 2-body Compton scattering process to perform a statistical time-ordering of the scatterings, with a high probability of precisely identifying where the gamma first interacted in the detector. In these cases the Line-of-Response is measured with high resolution, determined by the underlying physics processes and not the detector segmentation.