Implementation of a high level hands-on-training at an experimental PET scanner

The remarkable increase of medical imaging within the last decade demands the implementation of teaching programs for experts and students. Such courses must achieve both the realization of theoretical basics and an understanding of its implementation within real systems. This accounts for positron emission tomography (PET) as well. PET is, among other techniques like computer tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), one of the key technologies for biological and medical imaging. To teach and demonstrate the fundamentals of CT and the physical background of PET as well as to illustrate the signal processing of a coincidence measurement and the data processing of multi-parameter, list-mode data sets, the experimental PET scanner PET-TW05 has been developed. It is a simplified but still fully functional scanner consisting of two commercial BGO block-detectors. They are fixed in opposite to each other and can be moved along a linear axis and rotated around the field of view (FOV). The hardware layout and the software performance of the PET-TW05 scanner support the demonstration of important process steps of PET imaging like (i) system calibration, (ii) detector efficiency measurements, (iii) determination of time and spatial resolution of a PET scanner, (iv) list-mode data acquisition, (v) tomographic reconstruction by means of filtered backprojection, (vi) the effect of different filter kernels as well as of time and energy windows on the image quality, (vii) the influence of scatter on the image quality. Furthermore, the principle of time-of-flight PET can be experimentally demonstrated.