Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a functional imaging technique that uses radioactive substances known as radiotracers to visualize and measure changes in metabolic processes, and in other physiological activities including blood flow, regional chemical composition, and absorption. PET is both a medical and research tool used in pre-clinical and clinical settings. It is used heavily in the imaging of tumors and the search for metastases within the field of clinical oncology, and for the clinical diagnosis of certain diffuse brain diseases such as those causing various types of dementias. PET is a valuable research tool to learn and enhance our knowledge of the normal human brain, heart function, and support drug development. PET is also used in pre-clinical studies using animals. It allows repeated investigations into the same subjects over time, where subjects can act as their own control, and substantially reduces the number of animals required for a given study. This approach allows research studies to reduce the sample size needed while increasing the statistical quality of its results.
Major Projects:
- Single-ended depth-encoding Prism-PET Detector Module
- Interaction localization in PET detectors using convolutional neural networks
- Compton recovery of DOI PET
- The conformal brain prism-PET scanner
- Normalization and attenuation correction
- Conformal whole-body PET scanner
Associated Researchers:
- Andrew Labella, Dept. BME, SBU
- Xinjie Cao, Dept. ECE, SBU
- Eric Petersen, Dept. BME, SBU
- Zipai Wang, Dept. of BME
- Xinjie Zeng, Dept. ECE, SBU
- Yixin Li, Dept. ECE, SBU
- Arafat Meah, Dept. BME, SBU