Ambitious goals drive developers of Explorer PET project

Buoyed by a five-year, $15.5 million grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), a consortium of researchers has embarked on an ambitious trek to revolutionize PET imaging with the world's first total-body scanner, a system that would employ a half-million PET detectors.

The Explorer project is designed to create a high-sensitivity PET device that would image an entire human body simultaneously, using a line of detectors that runs the length of the scanner bore, as opposed to conventional PET scanners that image 20-cm segments at a time.

The project's goals include building a device to reduce a patient's radiation dose by a factor of 40 and to decrease scanning time from 20 minutes to 30 seconds. Read more.