Positron emission tomography (PET) is a nuclear medicine imaging technique

PET/MRI

Combining Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Medical Resonance Imagine (MRI) provides a diagnostic tool with unprecedented power to diagnose, treat and research cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular disease.

PET OEM customers and researchers are finding that the fusion of PET and MRI modalities is complicated by some essential incompatibilities of traditional PET and MRI systems.

The photomultiplier tubes (PMT) used to detect and quantify light produced by PET scintillator elements simply will not work in a magnetic field. Unlike PMT detectors, Silicon Photomultipliers (SPM) from sensL are not impacted by large magnetic fields.

sensL work to bring detector, packaging and electronics to the customer which are enabled for operation in large magnetic fields which are common in a combined PET/MRI scanner.

Benefits of sensL technology

SPMArray4 - Scalable Silicon Photomultiplier Array Group Shot Magnetics: sensL SPMArrays are designed to operate in 1.5 Tesla and 3.0 Tesla magnetic fields.

Uniformity: sensL SPM detector arrays can be operated from a single bias supply. This is a result of the high degree of uniformity of our SPMArray products.

Form Factor: SPM detectors have a small form factor. Coupling to scintillating crystals in a 1:1 configuration can provide a compact PET imager.

Performance: sensL SPMArray technology can provide <15% energy resolution and <1ns timing with simpler readout electronics than other solid-state detection system.

What are the relevant application?

Full body PET/MRI - Replacement of the vacuum tube based PMT detector with sensL SPM technology allows for a scalable system which allows for fully digital PET combined with MRI to be developed. sensL’s array detector and readout solutions provide customers with the ability to integrated solid-state detectors into their next generation PET/MRI systems in development.

Brain PET/MRI - The small form factor and compactness of the sensL SPMArray allows for brain specific PET/MRI to be developed and brought to the market. Many simultaneous PET/MRI systems in development are based around using existing big bore full body MRI scanners with a insertable PET head for brain imaging. The high gain compact sensL SPMArray coupled with our unrivalled uniformity allows for the development of compact detector heads and minimizes the electronics required for readout and coincidence detection.

Preclinical PET/MRI - Small animal PET/MRI requires detectors which are compact, flexible in pixel design and able to be coupled into high resolution systems. The sensL SPMArray provides this and sensL works directly with our customers to provide a solution suited to the application.

Organ specific PET/MRI - The sensL SPMArray is ideal for use in organ specific systems. Often these systems are miniature in size and require low cost for the markets in which they are entering. sensL provides the low cost and compact SPMArray in a variety of packaging formats which allows these systems to be developed.

Who uses the product?

OEM Customers

sensL provide our SPMArray technology and associated readout and data acquisition systems to our PET/MRI customers to allow for quick adoption and entry into the marketplace. Working with sensL provides our customers with access to a stable and manufacturable detector technology which can be used instead of the traditional vacuum tube based PMT or low gain APD technology. To speed our customer adoption we have developed a full range of readout architectures which allow for low cost PET/MRI systems to be brought to the market. These readout architectures minimize channel count and preserve the high performance of the SPM detector.

Research Customers

Our research customers gain the advantage of working with leading edge development in detectors and packaging which can make integration of solid-state SPM technology into the next generation PET/MRI system simple to perform. sensL seek to provide a full range of detector packaging and readout architectures which will allow our research customers to focus on the research they want to do and not on the electronics and packaging required to implement the technology. To assist our research customers with the development of their next generation systems, sensL co-founded openPET to provide electronics and readout systems which can be used by research customers to speed their research and development.

Applications