Electronics for High Resolution Breast-Dedicated PET
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: Positron emission tomography (PET) is a non-invasive, molecular imaging technology that has shown promise due to its ability to sense and visualize increased biochemical changes in malignant tissue well before physical changes occur. However, PET has not yet been incorporated into standard practice for breast cancer patient evaluation. Most PET systems are whole body imaging systems and not appropriate for breast imaging due to low sensitivity, inadequate spatial and contrast resolutions necessary to detect small tumors, high cost, and long scan times. As a result, PET’s role in breast cancer management is currently limited to only the evaluation and re-staging of recurrent breast cancer and distant metastasis. In order for PET’s role in other phases of breast cancer management to increase, the resolution needs to improve. This requires densely-packed sensors and high performance electronics.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The long term goal is to develop a high-resolution (~1mm), portable, breast-dedicated PET camera. A critical part of such a system is the read-out electronics, for which currently there is no satisfactory solution. This project focuses on developing the front-end integrated circuit (IC). An IC is a miniaturized electronic circuit that has been fabricated on the surface of a thin piece of silicon semiconductor material. The proposed electronic readout circuit would enable enhanced PET performance parameters such as spatial, energy, and temporal resolution that are important for visualizing and quantifying molecular signatures of breast cancer as well as allow a highly compact and portable instrument that is critical to clinical utility of a breast-specific PET system.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The IC we will design uses an innovative architecture that enables the analog circuits to be combined with the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in a single IC, while consuming much less power and having a much smaller electronic footprint than conventional approaches. This architecture also effectively produces a digitized pulse waveform, which is useful in research applications, since various software algorithms can be applied to improve the results. The IC will be programmable so that it can be used by breast imaging system developers at different institutions and with various types of PET detectors. Thus, our methodology involves designing circuit blocks so they can be
 
 easily modified and re-used for other applications. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The proposed IC facilitates the development of breast-dedicated PET systems with improved resolution. Potential clinical benefits are: 1) improvement of the prognosis of breast cancer as it can detect lesions earlier (when the lesions are smaller), 2) guiding biopsy by improving the accuracy of sampling malignant tissue, 3) guiding surgical resection of the primary tumor, where visualizing smaller clumps of malignant tissue at the resection margins could possibly help to reduce the rate of recurrence, and 4) early visualization of minuscule focal accumulation of PET tracer, which could help the accuracy of identifying local recurrence after treatment.