System Solution for Particle Therapy PET

At present, positron emission tomography (PET) is the only available technique for an in-vivo, non-invasive monitoring of the dose delivery precision in highly conformal ion beam therapy. The successful exploitation of in-beam PET at the Gesellschaft fuer Schwerionenforschung (GSI), Darmstadt, Germany during the last decade and a rising number of built or planned proton and heavier ion therapy facilities worldwide makes the development of a particle therapy PET (PT-PET) system of the next generation reasonable. The in-beam PET installation at GSI is a double-head positron scanner with a very limited solid angle which results in severe artifacts in the reconstructed images and in a low counting statistics. Thus, it is highly desirable to have larger solid angle coverage for PT-PET scanners of the next generation. However, increasing the effective area of a scanner might be limited by several requirements for the equipment of a radiotherapy treatment unit. Possible solutions for a prospective PT-PET system as well as a methodology for the evaluation of concurrent designs of the scanner taking into account the requirements of a therapy facility are discussed in this paper.