B. Frisch, et al. First Results with an Interventional Handheld PET IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference, San Diego, USA, November 2015 (bib)
	Radioguided surgery has proven to be a valuable tool for the interventional localisation of radioactive hotspots, guiding the physician to target tissue sampling for a biopsy or to identify cancerous tissue for resection. It is however mostly restricted to the use of low-energy gamma-emitting radiotracers. Indeed, while Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is an established functional imaging method for cancer diagnosis and staging, it is limited by its most common design in a gantry-based setup as well as the long time to acquire sufficient data to reconstruct an image, preventing its use as an intra-operative device. We develop a system which, composed of an external detector plate held by a mechanic arm and a handheld light-weight detector coupled to an ultrasound transducer, would allow for the live acquisition of multimodal PET/US images in an interventional environment. The detectors are based on matrices of 4x4 LYSO:Ce crystals coupled to arrays of 4x4 SiPMs?. In the plate, 256 matrices are grouped by 4 and read out by 64-channel ASICs, of which 16 are hosted by each front-end board. The endoscope consists in 2 matrices read out in a similar way. A PCIe data acquisition card concentrates event data for coincidence sorting. The position of both detectors is recorded with an optical tracking system. An iterative ML-EM algorithm reconstructs the image. We present energy spectra and reconstructed images acquired on a phantom where four cylindrical sources filled with FDG can be clearly identified.
	This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each authors copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.