Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, September 19, 2022
A Thirty-Year Perspective on Clinical PET
Chuck Stearns, PhD
Senior Advanced Development Engineer, Voximetry
When I joined GE in early 1990 the company was beginning to develop its first PET scanner for a clinical PET market that did not yet exist. More than thirty years later there are thousands of PET/CT scanners in the world performing over five million clinical scans per year, many of which were designed and manufactured at the GE facility in Waukesha. Over that time advances in detector technology, electronics and computer capabilities, and processing algorithms for PET data have decreased PET scan times and increased PET image quality substantially.
While that was taking place PET found a role in clinical patient management which continues to evolve today. This talk will describe the technological and other milestones that defined PET over the past 30 years, and discuss how current trends in PET will set the stage for the future.