Positron Emission Tomography
We are very pleased to announce we have received from the Paul Scherrer Institute our first order for the Swiss market of an EasyPET educational kit by CAEN SpA. After familiarizing himself with the product, our PSI customer will use it in summer 2018 in connection with an IEEE Instrumentation School course in South Africa.
CAEN has conceived different modular Educational Kits. The set-up are all based on Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM) state of-the-art sensor of light with single photon sensitivity and unprecedented photon number capability. The goal is to inspire students and guide them towards the analysis and comprehension of different physics phenomena with a series of experiments based on state-of-the art technologies, instruments and methods.
The EasyPET is a simple, user friendly and portable didactic PET system developed for high-level education, which allows exploring the physical and technological principles of the conventional human PET scanners, using the same basic detectors of state-of- the-art systems. The Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner is the state-of-the-art medical imaging system, capable of providing detailed functional information of physiological processes inside the human body. Functional imaging has a great impact in cancer diagnostics, monitoring of therapy effects and cancer drug development. The underlying principle to PET systems is the detection of high energy radiation emitted from a chemical marker, a molecule labelled with a radioisotope, administered to a patient. The radioisotope emits positrons which, after annihilating with atomic electrons, result in the isotropic emission of two photons back to back with an energy of 511 keV. The two photons are detected by a ring of detectors, which allows a pair of them to detect two back to back photons in any direction.
The easyPET educational kit permits focusing on:
- Gamma Spectroscopy and System Linearity
- Positron Annihilation Detection
- Nuclear Imaging
- Two-dimensional Reconstruction of a Radioactive Source
- Source Spatial Resolution
- Efficiency measurements
