DEVELOPMENT OF AN MR-PET TOMOGRAPHIC SCANNER

An MR-PET scanner has the potential of acquiring anatomical, functional and gross metabolic tissue status through MRI/MRS and metabolic activity through PET. The ultimate goal of a hybrid scanner is to yield temporal and spatial coregistration of MR and PET data. The objective of this research is to demonstrate the feasibility of developing a hybrid MR-PET scanner that performs MR and PET tomography on bioreactors or small animals. To achieve this goal a section of a magnetic field tolerant PET ring will function in the center of a 5.0 T/40cm MR magnet. This is a continuation of the work done through Small Grant for Innovative Technology, NIH/I-R03-RR07O42-01, that experimentally showed positron range squeezing in a magnetic field. This proposal should lay the foundation for engineering a hybrid MR-PET scanner that simultaneously performs MR and PET tomography. An advantage of conducting a PET experiment in a magnetic field is that intrinsic in-plane spatial resolution improves. This is important for small diameter PET rings whose spatial resolution may exceed the intrinsic spatial resolution of a PET image due to positron range blurring. Thus, especially for the case of high energy positron emitters (e.g., 11-C, 15- O, 68-Ga, 82-Rb), the possibility of acquiring high resolution in-plane images (