Today J-PET, a posi­tron emis­sion tomo­gra­phy scan­ner, desi­gned and con­struc­ted in the Marian Smo­lu­chow­ski Insti­tute of Phy­sics on the Jagiel­lo­nian Uni­ver­sity, has been pre­sen­ted in Cra­cow. The inno­va­tive device is much dif­fe­rent from the tra­di­tio­nal PET scan­ners. The use of poly­mer detec­tors, which are seve­ral times che­aper than the inor­ga­nic ones, in com­bi­na­tion with a fully digi­tal elec­tro­nics, allows for con­struc­tion of a modu­lar and com­pact scan­ner. The uni­que way of col­lec­ting data about the place of coin­ci­dence based on the time of detec­tion of pho­tons emit­ted from the patien­t’s body, allows for uti­li­zing com­ple­tely new methods of body ima­ging based on multi-pho­ton decays. So far, those types of decay have never been uti­li­zed for this pur­pose.

After years of work, it can be said, that this is a great suc­cess of the whole team of engi­ne­ers, doctors and scien­ti­sts. Employ­ees of Natio­nal Cen­tre for Nuc­lear Rese­arch were among them.

„Świerk Com­pu­ting Cen­tre has deve­lo­ped a dedi­ca­ted software for ana­ly­sis and data simu­la­tion in J-PET” – expla­ins Pro­fes­sor Woj­ciech Wiślicki, Direc­tor of the NCBJ Depart­ment of Com­plex Systems. „The simu­la­tions allo­wed us to eva­lu­ate the machine accor­ding to the NEMA stan­dards (Natio­nal Elec­tri­cal Manu­fac­tu­rers Asso­cia­tion) for dia­gno­stic devi­ces. ”

„Our team also cre­ated methods of signal recon­struc­tion in the data acqu­isi­tion sys­tem and recon­struc­tion of the image of the patien­t’s body” – adds Woj­ciech Krze­mień, PhD Eng. „The recon­struc­tion is com­ple­ted using three methods, which ena­bles us to reach the image reso­lu­tion bet­ter than 1 cm. ”

More about the pro­ject on the UJ website: http: //koza. if. uj. edu. pl/pet/