Imaging Is Believing: The Future Of Human Total-Body Molecular Imaging Starts Now

Explorer brings revolution to medical imaging. The wealth of molecular/functional information provided by a single scan is overwhelming. Beyond the obvious issues of how to store and analyze this vast amount of data, and how to fuse the PET images from the almost 200cm long total-body PET imager with MRI images, the imaging scientists work on improving spatiotemporal resolution of the scanner. But how can we obtain better spatial and time (time of flight) resolutions at the same time? Efforts to push timing resolution down to 50 ps and potentially even down to 10 Ps were initiated. While attaining similar to 1 mm resolution in the total-body Explorer imager is not immediately practically possible or even justifiable, due to other limiting factors such as large amount of recorded coincident events ("statistics") necessary to produce good quality similar to 1 mm resolution images in the human body and not just as before in the small animal body, one of the high-resolution scenarios is to imagine and start planning magnifying attachments-inserts to the Explorer scanner and a dedicated very high-performing 1 mm resolution, 100 Ps or better TOF resolution and similar to 30% efficiency) compact brain imager. This (Explorer + Brain) Tandem PET scanner may be closer to the ideal optimal human PET imager, if there is small interference between the two imager components to image body and brain, respectively. Other options such as 100cm long extended Torso Explorer plus Brain Imager are also being discussed.