Ultra-High Resolution High Sensitivity PET for Plant Imaging

PET is a very powerful functional imaging technology and has the capacity to measure the transport and distribution of radionuclides, labeled photoassimilates in plants in 3D. PET Imaging of plants will help scientist to understand how plants respond to environmental stresses, and have many potential applications such as improving agriculture, improving plant performance to clean up environmental pollutants, and improving the production of biofuels from crops. Commercially available PET scanners are not optimal for imaging studies focused on plant and microbial research. Many of the imaging systems currently used in this field of research rely on outdated detector technologies that lack the spatial resolution and sensitivity. The goal of the proposed project is to design and build a PET detector with very fine scintillator arrays coupled to a new photodetector technology, position sensitive silicon photomultiplier (PS-SSPM) for plant imaging as well as small animal imaging. The main innovation of the proposed detector design over previously investigated detectors is its ability to achieve high sensitivity and high spatial resolution. High performance and low cost are expected from the proposed detectors. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: The proposed detector technology will be very promising for radionuclide based imaging of plants. It will also be applicable to many other gamma-ray imaging systems including clinical, preclinical PET as well as those for astronomy and nuclear non-proliferation.