From the June 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
* Scan more gently. We can use the sensitivity to use less radioactive material. This is very important for pediatric patients, or for doing scientific studies where we want to scan the same patient many times to look for changes. Examples would be learning more about the biology and cures for arthritis, or diabetes or obesity, where the diseases have time courses of many years.
In addition, one can scan everything. The ability to scan the entire body at the same time allows us to make movies showing, for example, how drugs move around inside the body. This allows us to see to what degree new drugs hit their target, and to what degree they hit non-target organs, causing side-effects. We can also learn about interactions and signaling between different organ systems. For example, the brain and the gut. This could prove to be very important for Parkinson's disease, for Alzheimer's disease, and for obesity, among others.
HCB News: What hurdles stand in the way of completing this project? Do you have a completion date in mind?
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B & C: This will be the biggest, most complex PET scanner for human use yet built. The scanner has over 560,000 detector elements and almost 54,000 light sensors and channels of electronics. There will always be engineering problems of scale-up that we will have to address. But likely the most challenging issue will be the very large amount of data we are going to generate, possibly up to 40 TB per day. This all has to be rapidly processed to produce images we can work with.
HCB News: You've already constructed a small-scale preclinical scanner in partnership with Siemens. What did you learn from that project?
B & C: We learned that the standard methods for calibrating the scanner will probably not work. We had to develop some new approaches even for our smaller-scale device. However, we are not expecting any major hold-ups there. In some ways, the extra sensitivity will allow us more flexibility with making data corrections. More importantly, the smaller-scale prototype will allow us to learn more about possible applications that we can try once we have the full-size device. This work has only just begun. We have scanned our first patient with the preclinical device, a pet dog with osteosarcoma that needed the scan to see if her cancer had spread. And we look forward to scanning many more.
