Home Department: Undeclared
Mentor: Craig Levin (Radiology)

"Exploring a Novel Calibration Approach to Achieve <250 Picosecond Temporal Resolution for a Brain-Dedicated Time-of-Flight Positron Emission Tomography Scanner"

PETcoil Gen II is a novel MRI-compatible time-of-flight (TOF) PET system developed by the Molecular Imaging Instrumentation Laboratory (MIIL) at Stanford for simultaneous PET–MRI imaging of neurological disorders. TOF-PET enables substantial boosts to reconstructed image signal-to-noise ratio which increase as the photon detector timing resolution improves. The Levin lab goal of <240 picosecond temporal resolution performance requires precise calibration of timing skews between the thousands of detector channels in the system. James’s project focuses on formulating and validating a line source–based time-skew calibration algorithm using both Monte Carlo simulations and experimental data. His hypothesis is that this approach will not only improve the calibration efficiency and overall image quality and accuracy compared with methods used previously, but also simplify the experimental protocols and data acquisition.