title: Enhancement of molecular sensitivity in positron emission tomography with quantum correlation of γ-ray photons.
abstract: Enhancement of molecular sensitivity in positron emission tomography (PET) has long been discussed with respect to imaging instrumentation and algorithms for data treatment. Here, the molecular sensitivity in PET is discussed on the basis of 2-dimensional coincident measurements of 511 keV γ ray photons resultant from two-photon annihilation. Introduction of an additional selection window based on the energy sum and difference of the coincidently measured γ ray photons, without any significant instrumental and algorithmic changes, showed an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by an order of magnitude. Improvement of performance characteristics in the PET imaging system was demonstrated by an increase in the noise equivalent count rate (NECR) which takes both the SNR and the detection efficiency into consideration. A further improvement of both the SNR and the NECR is expected for the present system in real clinical and in-vivo environments, where much stronger positron sources are employed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Sciences, Tokyo Gakugei University, 4-1-1 Koganei, Tokyo 184-8501, Japan.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sato
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba 305-8568, Japan.
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kobayashi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004867:Equipment Design; D005720:Gamma Rays; D017785:Photons; D049268:Positron-Emission Tomography / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*