Photonics for Life, the European SPADnet project
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the developed world today. Medical imaging via positron emission tomography (PET) is one of the most effective diagnostics techniques available to oncologists to date. While the image quality of PET scans has significantly improved in the last decade, detection of tumors below a few millimeters in size is still difficult. The emergence of time-of-flight PET holds the promise of improved contrast and thus of better resolution. SPADnet is a FP7 funded project aimed at creating a fully digital, networked MRI compatible time-of-flight PET system, exploiting the speed and integration density of deep-submicron CMOS technologies. The core technologies of SPADnet are a sensor tile comprising an array of 8×16 pixels, each composed of 4 mini-silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) with in situ time-to-digital conversion, a multi-ring network to filter, carry, and process data produced by the sensors at 2Gbps, and a 130nm CMOS process enabling mass-production of photonic modules that are optically interfaced to scintillator crystals. The SPADnet photonic modules comprise a matrix of tightly packed sensor tiles; each module is networked in multiple rings, where coincidence pairs are identified and readily used in reconstruction algorithms, enabling scalable, MRI compatible preclinical PET systems for multi-modal imaging.
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Edoardo Charbon, Delft University of Technology | Download presentation |