Technical Requirements of a Clinical PET Center: Data Acquisition and Processing

Abstract

An objective assessment of the demands for data acquisition and processing capabilities and of the changes associated with the evolution of PET from a pure research tool into a clinical modality is almost impossible. Clinical PET is still an emerging technique which is not yet widely available for patient care. The future impact of PET on patient management in various diagnostic entities can only be projected today. The application of PET, however, is the major determinant for the technical capabilities required for the hard and software. Unfortunately, the technical evolution of PET hardware and software itself may change the practice of clinical PET in the future; e.g., there were no relevant clinical application of dynamic studies with single slice scanners, however, the availability of modern volume imagers, which can acquire dynamic data over a clinically useful field-ofview, may make quantitative dynamic approaches interesting for selected clinical questions. A validation, however, has to await the more widespread availability of these systems in the clinical PET community. Since PET systems are long-term investments, great care has to be exercised not to lock the clinical user of tomorrow into limitations imposed by the hardware which are conceived from the limited perspective of clinical PET today. Although it may be worthwhile to investigate these questions in a more rigorous way, this exceeds the scope of this article. Therefore, this paper will present a subjective view of several issues of data acquisition and processing in PET which stems from our own experience of starting up and running a PET center with basic and clinical research as well as patient care.